Marronage in Saint-Domingue (Haiti): Uses of the Internet

In 2010, a remarkable online database of nearly 11,000 runaway slave advertisements from Les Affiches Americaines (1766-1790), the newspaper of colonial Saint-Domingue, was launched by the French historian Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec at the Université de Sherbrooke, in Canada (see Marronage in Saint-Domingue (Haïti), available on the Internet at  http://www.marronnage.info/en/index.html). This online collection provides information on some 14,864 slaves, with all of the database content in the original French. This conference paper will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the Marronage in Saint-Domingue (Haïti) database and its online presentation, and by doing so will examine the uses of Internet resources in documenting runaway slaves in the Atlantic world more generally. The objective of this discussion is to contribute to a larger debate over methods for compiling and disseminating online collections of runaway slave advertisements (and databases derived from them), as part of a larger project and network of researchers engaged in the documentation of runaway slaves in the Francophone Americas and throughout the Atlantic world, as well as to introduce English-speaking historians to this remarkable French-language resource.