Chapter 3 - Between Enslaved Territories and Overseas Provinces

Summary

Chapter 3 explores the French government’s quest to appease its recalcitrant white planter elite in the Îles du Vent between the Seven Years War and the French Revolution and the unexpected consequences of these efforts. In 1759, the crown created three chambres mi-parties d’agriculture et de commerce in its Caribbean colonies in which planter elites could discuss the means and obstacles to French colonial prosperity. Additionally, it invited a colonial deputy from each chamber to join metropolitan deputes in the Royal Council of Commerce in Paris. The chapter argues that this reform moved the main French sugar colonies closer to the status of an overseas province. It further reveals how reform generated opportunities for the colonial elite to develop a creole political economic discourse with which to promote their own economic interests against the metropole. Focusing on Martinique’s chambre mi-partie d’agriculture et de commerce and its successor institutions, it exposes planters’ eclectic appropriation of economic ideas in circulation – including those of the Physiocrats – to defend their fiscal, commercial, and legal colonial interests. Years of rehearsing their creole perspective would stand them in good stead when French revolutionaries gave white planters a voice within the new French National Assembly in 1789.