Such a Small Atlantic World—Between New Orleans and Cuba in the Early Nineteenth Century

In 1809, with thousands of other refugees from the Haitian Revolution, Jean Boze sailed to New Orleans from the Cuban Oriente. After six years on the island, he had to find another asylum to escape the turmoil of the Caribbean colonial world. In 1820, however, he went back to Cuba and remained eight years on the island before sailing back to the Crescent City. Throughout his stay, he wrote regular letters to his friend and benefactor, Henri de Sainte-Gême, who had shared Boze’s first Cuban experience, had fled with him to New Orleans in 1809, and had returned to France in 1818. Although the refugees had to suffer the consequences of the Napoleonic wars in the early 1810s, Boze’s experience shows that the European empires were largely interconnected in the Americas and that the refugees had few limitations in their movements and economic ventures. Living in Cuba, although it sometimes proved difficult to Boze, was no real challenge to a French citizen, refugee from one of the Atlantic revolutions. This presentation will study the Cuban letters Boze sent from to Sainte-Gême, showing the interconnections within the Saint-Domingue refugee diaspora, the privileged links between Cuba and New Orleans, and the porosity of the circum-Caribbean world in the early nineteenth century.