Book description
In the eighteenth century, the Cul de Sac plain in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, was a vast open-air workhouse of sugar plantations. This microhistory of one plantation owned by the Ferron de la Ferronnayses, a family of Breton nobles, draws on remarkable archival finds to show that despite the wealth such…
Why read it?
1 author picked Cul de Sac as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Cul de Sac is an enticing micro-historical study of the economic trajectory of the old-regime French plantation complex in Saint-Domingue. Through deft mining of the archives of a noble family from Brittany and their correspondence with the overseer of their sugar plantation in the Cul-de-Sac plain, Cheney argues in this book that growing tensions between nascent capitalism and old-regime political and social structures pushed the model of the plantation complex in Saint-Domingue toward a dead-end even prior to the French and Haitian Revolutions.
From Pernille's list on The best books on France and Its eighteenth-century colonial empire.
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