The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

there is no other suggestion that this was a concubinage relationship like that between her mother and father.

      Like Constantia Phillips in Jamaica, Minette called on Saint-Domingue’s public to embrace its European identity. In a 1782 newspaper advertisement she decried “those ephemeral productions that bastardize and degrade the lyric stage, which are only local and which very often only address the everyday events of private society.”¹⁴⁷ This statement was not merely a reference to the widespread use of tropical sets, costumes, and creole dialog and lyrics.¹⁴⁸ Minette was also criticizing the racial stereotypes that increasingly defined even freeborn people of color like her as part of the enslaved population. For example, in 1786 the husband of her former acting teacher produced a pantomime entitled Arlequin mulâtresse sauvé par Macandal (Arlequin, Mulâtresse Saved by Macandal).¹⁴⁹ The text no longer exists, but Macandal was an escaped slave said to be the mastermind of a poisoning conspiracy, an episode we examine in Chapter 5. Minette’s sister Lise appears to have performed in such plays, for example, as in the 1786 performance of Les Amours de Mirebalais (The Loves of Mirebalais),¹⁵⁰ a colonial adaption of Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer).¹⁵¹ Minette’s public defense of the French theatrical tradition against ephemeral colonial productions shows that she rejected being defined solely by her race or sexuality, even if she worked in an occupation and in a space that was highly sexualized. Minette seems to have wanted to highlight the theater, as Lauren Clay puts it, as “an imaginary … that represented … a world in which free people of color could be fully and equally French.”¹⁵²

      The lives of Teresia Phillips and Minette show that we need to be skeptical about descriptions of women in these societies. Their admittedly extraordinary careers belie the sharp contrasts that Long and Moreau made between passive but consuming white women and passionate but corrupting free women of color. These were working women, who defined themselves by what they did as actresses and devotees of the theater, rather than by their maternal role or even by their relation to white men. The distance between what white women and free women of color actually did was not that great in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Colonial ideologies stressed the distance between the two, especially after the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, as efforts to make racial categories more distinct took hold in both colonies. What the lives of both women outlined in this chapter show is that, for freeborn people, urban society was a place of opportunity and, to some extent, liberation. While the mix of people and cultures, the lack of conventional religious institutions, and the prevailing materialism bewildered commentators, this “chaos of men” or “excess of civilization” provided a way for women like Phillips and Minette to construct identities that defied stereotypes.

      By the start of the Seven Years’ War, both Saint-Domingue and Jamaica had moved past the frontier stage of their development. They had established themselves as conspicuously successful plantation societies. They were culturally vibrant, dynamic, and economically valuable imperial possessions. Commentators new to West Indian mores and West Indian slavery found them disturbing places, where much of quotidian existence seemed immoral or at least dysfunctional. The harshness of slavery contrasted strongly with white peoples’ devotion to pleasures of the flesh; the colonies had become vital imperial possessions, but colonists were only partially attached to European norms. White elites rejected religion, paid little attention to social rank, and embraced money as the measure of all things.

      In the next forty years, these characteristics became more firmly entrenched as Jamaica and Saint-Domingue entered into the period of their greatest prosperity. It was also a period in which Jamaica and Saint-Domingue became important within the geopolitics of the French and British Atlantic empires. That geopolitical importance became clear during the Seven Years’ War, despite the fact that it was largely fought outside the Greater Antilles. It is to this conflict we now turn.

      CHAPTER 4

      The Seven Years’ War in the West Indies

      The Seven Years’ War in the West Indies was important in two ways, besides including the Caribbean in what is sometimes called the first global war. First, Britain’s capture of Canada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Havana threatened the cohesiveness of France’s New World empire. Although British negotiators refrained from a peace treaty that would allow George III to dominate the Caribbean, the war showed that London’s power in the region was as much commercial as military. French planters in Guadeloupe and Martinique, like their counterparts in Cuba, profited from the British occupation, while colonists in Saint-Domingue chafed under what they saw as an overly harsh wartime regime. The postwar history of Saint-Domingue was devoted to government reforms designed to strengthen colonists’ loyalty to the French Empire. Second, the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War marked the beginning of a period of prolonged economic prosperity in the plantation economies of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Planters were never more powerful than in the three decades following the Peace of Paris in 1763.

      Nevertheless, colonists faced challenges from metropolitan authorities. London and Versailles recognized the importance of each colony to imperial prosperity and insisted that they could control sometimes recalcitrant colonists. In Jamaica, moreover, planters faced the most violent slave uprising that had ever occurred in the Caribbean to that date. Their reaction to that challenge was to establish a new racial regime on the island, as Chapter 5 explains.

      After establishing their first Antillean colonies on the smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean in the 1620s and 1630s, Britain and France found footholds in the Spanish-dominated Greater Antilles several decades later. For the next century, the two nations tangled with each other in the western Caribbean in a series of intense but short-lived local conflicts, while building up their plantations and transforming their colonies into profitable but brutal slave societies. Conflict heated up in the 1740s, starting in 1744 when France entered an Anglo-Spanish conflict that had begun in 1739 (the War of Jenkins’s Ear), thereby joining it to the ongoing European War of the Austrian Succession. It is instructive to dwell a little on this conflict because it highlights, in its limited aims, how different the Seven Years’ War was from previous Caribbean wars. France began the war in 1744 with only twenty-seven ships of the line, compared to the British navy, which had seventy-seven ships of the line.¹ This naval imbalance allowed England to attack Spanish ports in Peru and Chile and capture a Spanish treasure galleon in the Philippines.² Despite its naval superiority, Britain gained no new Caribbean territory in this conflict, thus preserving the balance of power it had established with France and Spain in the 1650s. It captured Spanish Porto Bello in 1739 and made an abortive attack on Cartagena in 1741.³ But these conquests were relinquished at the peace, for the primary aim of these assaults had been to harass the Spanish, not to gain new territory. Significantly, in the War of Austrian Succession (1744–48) Britain did not attack France’s Caribbean colonies. This war’s major theaters were in North America, India, and Europe as British colonists did not want to gain new sugar lands, since expanding sugar production might reduce its overall price. Perhaps more important, Caribbean warfare was amazingly destructive of manpower. Even a short occupation, as in Cartagena in 1741, resulted in thousands of deaths of British regular and colonial troops, mostly from disease.⁴

      Consequently, the only clamor for annexation of French and Spanish West Indian islands came from a couple of British newspapers unaware of the dread demography of the region. A correspondent in the Newcastle Courant wondered “whether Quebec, St. Augustine, the Havannah, St. Domingo, or the fortress of Martinico, be not of more importance to us” than land in Flanders.⁵ In any event, British statesmen were impervious to such calls for action. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748, which ended the war, left Caribbean territory unchanged. Britain returned the fortress at Louisburg, in modern Nova Scotia, to France, which saw this installation as essential to its status as a maritime power.⁶ In return France withdrew from the Austrian Netherlands, an ideal staging ground for an invasion of Britain.⁷

      The