The Meaning of Freedom: Slave Self-Purchase and the Making of Free Labour in Martinique (2020)
This article examines the introduction of legalized slave savings and compulsory slave self-purchase—the pécule légal and rachat forcé—by the Mackau Laws in the French colony of Martinique in the last years of the July Monarchy. Drawing on official correspondence, political debates, published pamphlets and individual cases of slave self-purchase, it examines official efforts to replace a system of bondage rooted in direct, personal domination and explicit violence with a system of colonial labour based on free labour and impersonal social controls. Their efforts were profoundly shaped by two sets of actors: members of the pro-slavery lobby and the enslaved. Together these two groups defined a minimal standard of free labour that would have far-reaching impact on colonial labour policy in the post-emancipation period.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Dorit Brixius;
(2019)
From Ethnobotany to Emancipation: Slaves, Plant Knowledge, and Gardens on Eighteenth-Century Isle de France
(/isis/citation/CBB518452624/)
Book
Andrés Avelino de Orihuela;
(2021)
The Sun of Jesús del Monte: A Cuban Antislavery Novel
(/isis/citation/CBB985131973/)
Book
Zach Sell;
(2021)
Trouble of the world : Slavery and empire in the age of capital
(/isis/citation/CBB673762938/)
Article
Pascale N. Graham;
(2021)
Sex work, containment and the new discourse of public health in French colonial Levant
(/isis/citation/CBB428871612/)
Article
J'Nese Williams;
(2021)
Plantation Botany: Slavery and the Infrastructure of Government Science in the St. Vincent Botanic Garden, 1765–1820
(/isis/citation/CBB785011260/)
Book
Campbell, Gwyn;
Stanziani, Alessando;
(2013)
Bonded Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean World
(/isis/citation/CBB001421572/)
Article
Robert Michael Morrissey;
(2015)
The Power of the Ecotone: Bison, Slavery, and the Rise and Fall of the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia
(/isis/citation/CBB848175029/)
Article
Weaver, Karol K.;
(2004)
“She Crushed the Child's Fragile Skull”: Disease, Infanticide, and Enslaved Women in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue
(/isis/citation/CBB000660567/)
Article
Weaver, Karol K.;
(2012)
Surgery, Slavery and the Circulation of Knowledge in the French Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB001251768/)
Article
Austin R. Cooper;
(2019)
“A Ray of Sunshine on French Tables”: Citrus Fruit, Colonial Agronomy, and French Rule in Algeria (1930–1962)
(/isis/citation/CBB511388235/)
Book
Higgs, Catherine;
(2012)
Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB001421818/)
Book
David Richardson;
(2022)
Principles and Agents: the British slave trade and its abolition
(/isis/citation/CBB104965625/)
Book
Kathleen M. Brown;
(2023)
Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition
(/isis/citation/CBB065925879/)
Article
Kate Ramsey;
(2021)
Powers of Imagination and Legal Regimes against “Obeah” in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB140553807/)
Book
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers;
(2019)
They were her property : White women as slave owners in the American South
(/isis/citation/CBB536660173/)
Book
Paolo Conte;
(2021)
Il più grande male dell'umanità. Alexander von Humboldt nell'abolizionismo francese dei primi dell'800
(/isis/citation/CBB486493587/)
Book
Katherine Paugh;
(2017)
The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition
(/isis/citation/CBB922169542/)
Article
Gavin Wright;
(2020)
Slavery and Anglo-American capitalism revisited
(/isis/citation/CBB835225218/)
Book
Bruce A. Ragsdale;
(2021)
Washington at the plow : The founding farmer and the question of slavery
(/isis/citation/CBB486752354/)
Article
John Stewart;
(2020)
Chemistry and Slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB766765131/)
Be the first to comment!