To Put a Stop to This Shameful Commerce: Slavery, the Household, and Interracial Sexuality in the 19th-Century French Antilles

This paper will examine how interracial sex between enslaved women and slaveholding men generated conflict and anxiety over maintaining patriarchal order within colonial households (and by extension white colonial rule) in the nineteenth-century French Antilles. Drawing on fragmentary archives, the private diaries of a Martinican planter, and administrative correspondence, this paper will explore how interracial sex between enslaved women and white men became an increasing political problem in colonial households in the early nineteenth century, as France sought to recover from losing its wealthiest sugar colony and slaveholders faced a growing abolitionist consensus in the metropole. This paper explores this problem through the microcosm of the plantation household, where interracial sex and intimacy created familial relationships among slaveholders and enslaved people compelled to perform domestic and reproductive labor for them. In many instances, interracial sex between white men and slave women created a multi-family household—with natural-born and mixed-race enslaved children serving their fathers and half siblings. What, therefore, can interracial sex and families—forged through violence, intimacy, labor, and coercion—reveal about broader dynamics of race, gender, and social order during a tumultuous period in the French empire? What can they help us understand about how slavery and power were reconstituted in the French Antilles following the loss of Haiti? And how did the interracial plantation household shape contemporaneous debates over the future of slavery in the French Caribbean? This paper will offer preliminary insights into these questions, at the core of an article-in-progress, by examining how interracial intimacies functioned in the slaveholding households of white elite planters.