A Turbulent time : the French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean /

These nine essays represent current thinking about the pervasive and variable impact of the French Revolution, and revolution in Saint Dominigue on the Caribbean and Spanish Florida, New Orleans and French Louisiana. Against a backcloth of abolitionist sentiment in Europe there was continuity and discontinuity in the Caribbean, where plantation economies were expanding. The region was characterized by slave labor; racial discrimination and conflicts; tensions between free persons of color and slaves; continual influx of slaves and intra-Caribbean population movements; political destabilization; upheaval in the colonial power structures; and struggles for colonial autonomy. This volume highlights changing core-periphery relations and illustrates how events in Saint Dominigue provoked swift metropolitan responses, eroded France's standing as a colonial power, and contributed to the decision to sell Louisiana to the US. Broad interpretive essays and case studies examine factors internal and external to the Caribbean and underline the interconnectedness of the Caribbean, but fail to show the bigger picture of linkage--political and ideological--to Spanish mainland colonies and to Brazil. Stimulating, incisive, insightful, sometimes revisionist, this volume is required reading for historians of comparative colonialism in an age of revolution. Upper-division undergraduates and above. A. J. R. Russell-Wood; Johns Hopkins University