A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean

"Stimulating, incisive, insightful, sometimes revisionist, this volume is required reading for historians of comparative colonialism in an age of revolution." --Choice

"[An] eminently original and intellectually exciting book." --William and Mary Quarterly

This volume examines several slave societies in the Greater Caribbean to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutionary age on the region. Built precariously on the exploitation of slave labor, organized according to the doctrine of racial discrimination, the plantation colonies were particularly vulnerable to the message of the French Revolution, which proved all the more potent because it coincided with the emergence of the antislavery movement in the Atlantic world and interacted with local traditions of resistance among the region's slaves, free coloreds, and white colonists.

"[An] eminently original and intellectually exciting book."

David Barry Gaspar, Professor of History at Duke University, is the author of Bondmen and Rebels, co-editor of More Than Chattel, and author of many articles about the African diaspora.

David Patrick Geggus, Professor of History at the University of Florida, is the author of Haitian Revolutionary Studies (IU Press) and Slavery, War, and Revolution.

Introduction

1. Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean 1789-1815, David P. Geggus

2. The French revolution in Saint Dominique: Triumph or Failure?, Carolyn E. Fick

3. The French Revolution and British Attitudes to the Caribbean Colonies, Michael Duffy

4. La Guerre des Bois: Revolution, War and Slavery in Saint Lucia, 1793-1838, David Barry Gaspar

5. Slave Resistance in the Spanish Caribbean in the Mid- 1790s, David P. Geggus

6. Rebellion and Royalism in Spanish Florida: The French Revolution on Spain's Northern Colonial Frontier, Jane Landers

7. Conflicting Loyalties: The French Revolution and Free People of Color in Spanish New Orleans, Kimberly S. Hanger

8. Revolutionary St. Dominique in the Making of Territorial Louisiana, Robert L. Paquette

9. The Admission of Slave Testimony at British Military Courts in the West Indies, 1800-1809, Roger N. Buckley

Contributors

Index