Tropical Despotisms - by David Allen Harvey (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Tropical Despotisms examines efforts to cultivate a new patriotic community rooted in the Enlightenment principles of honor and civic virtue in France's Caribbean possessions during the period between the Seven Years' War and the Revolution. Following France's humiliating defeat at the hands of the British, a loose coalition of frustrated and enlightened reformers hoped to promote imperial regeneration in order to restore France's wounded national pride, stabilize and strengthen the Antillean colonies, and bind them more closely to the metropole"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize

Tropical Despotisms reveals the alarm that spread among France's Caribbean possessions during the period between the Seven Years' War and the Revolution and the determination to cultivate a new patriotic community rooted in the Enlightenment principles of honor and civic virtue.

Following France's humiliating defeat at the hands of the British, a loose coalition of frustrated and enlightened reformers hoped to promote imperial regeneration in order to restore France's wounded national pride, stabilize and strengthen the Antillean colonies, and bind the colonies more closely to the metropole.

David Allen Harvey describes the historical relationship between capitalism and slavery in the making of the modern world economy and moves beyond simplistic arguments by discussing the contingent and evolving dynamic between the two. As a result, he reveals how capitalism and slavery developed in tandem in the eighteenth-century Caribbean but explains that reformers sought to enact a gradual transition to a free wage labor regime more in keeping with capitalism's ideal of free and voluntary contractual relationships between formally equal parties.

Tropical Despotisms provides a new perspective on the social and demographic structure in the French Antilles and the wider French Atlantic world. Harvey uncovers not only the deep and critical debates around the issues of slavery and race but also the efforts by enlightened reformers as they proposed rethinking the political and economic structures by which the empire had been ruled, rationalizing governing institutions, and liberalizing trade.

Review Quotes

Harvey skillfully weaves together a substantial array of primary and secondary sources to examine how reformist discourse affected economics, colonial relationships, and conceptions of race and social standing within the French colonial Caribbean. In doing so, Tropical Despotisms successfully contributes to the scholarship of patriotism, French nationalism, and the history of capitalism and political economy in France within the context of the Old Regime.

-- "Choice"

About the Author

David Allen Harvey is Professor of History at New College of Florida. He is the author of several books, including The French Enlightenment and Its Others, Beyond Enlightenment, and Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace, 1830-1945.