Whither Saint Domingue? Amelioration in the Caribbean and French Revolutionary Politics of the 1790s

The calls that intensified in the second half of the 18^th-century for ameliorating the conditions of enslaved people were intimately connected to the persistence of slavery as a labour regime. Indeed, one of the goals of amelioration was the prevention of slave rebellions that might threaten systems of production that depended on slave labour. In the British Atlantic world, this possibility materialized when the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791, and it henceforth functioned for proponents of amelioration as a warning of the possible consequences of planter excesses in cruelty and cupidity and an incentive to improve planter-slave relations. Paradoxically, however, British Caribbean planters such as Edward Long and Bryan Edwards held up Saint Domingue as a model of a successful sugar colony.

In this paper, I situate British debates over amelioration in French revolutionary politics of 1790s – both in the metropole and in the Caribbean - , and explore two paradoxes that emerge out of the British perspective of presumed French successes and failures: first, a strain of British discourse that described French planters as 'superior' (notwithstanding the radical overturning of slavery with the 1794 emancipation proclamation); and second, the opposition of French reactionary planters to the Amis des noirs in French amelioration debates before and after the proclamation. I argue that the central contradiction of French and British planters' views of how slavery had to evolve in order to preserve its roots are found in repeated subsistence crises going back to the slave plantation complex's origins: the awareness that slavery could only be stabilized and sustained through attention to food provisioning and the effective administration of transatlantic trades in foodstuffs, although committing the resources needed for provisioning in this manner was almost entirely antithetical to the policies and practices of colonial planters and metropolitan authorities alike.