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A Tale of Two Coffee Colonies: Environment and Slavery in Suriname and Saint-Domingue, ca. 1750–1790

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2022

Rafael de Bivar Marquese
Rafael de Bivar Marquese*
Affiliation:
Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, São Paulo, Brazil
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Abstract

In the second half of the eighteenth century, European metropolitan powers succeeded in overcoming the dominance that Yemen had hitherto exercised over the world coffee supply. Two colonies of the New World stood out in this transformation, both employing African slave labor on a large scale: Suriname, owned by the Dutch, and Saint-Domingue, the main French colony in the Caribbean. However, Suriname’s growth was short-lived, and it was soon surpassed by the productive leap of Saint-Domingue. The article explores the divergent trajectories of these two colonies, focusing on the environmental conditions of the operation of coffee plantations. Rather than taking the specific combinations of land, labor, capital, and political power as an independent and locally determined set, the article examines how the coffee trajectories of Suriname and Saint-Domingue were mutually formative through the specific evolving relationships that each space had within the world-system.

Keywords

coffeeslaverySurinameSaint-Domingueenvironmentslave resistanceplantations
Type
Labor in the World-System
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 722 - 755
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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Footnotes

Acknowledgments: Previous versions of this article were presented on different occasions in Brazil (UFRGS-Porto Alegre), Spain (LASA-Barcelona), the United States (University of Wisconsin and University of Georgia), and also at the Global History, Globally Summer Seminar. For all their comments and suggestions, I wish to thank Dale Tomich, Leonardo Marques, Juliana Zanezi, Ricardo H. Salles, Tamira Combrink, Pepijn Brandon, Pablo F. Goméz, Tania Murray Li, Samantha Payne, Charles Maier, Sven Beckert, David Thomas, Daniel Rood, Neil Safier, William Link, Leida Fernández Prieto, Fábio Kühn, Steven Topik, the comrades of Coletivo Braudel, and the anonymous reviewers of CSSH. This article is partially the result of a larger research project sponsored by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq). All translations of French are my own unless otherwise indicated.

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