| Abstract |
"Entrepôt of Revolutions places the American, French, and Haitian revolutions in a single, connected, analytic frame. At the heart of this relationship was not just republican politics, but also commerce between France and the United States, commerce that turned on the fate of Saint-Domingue/Haiti. The book centers imperial trade as a driving force, arguing that commercial factors preceded and conditioned political change across the revolutionary Atlantic. At the crux of these transformations was the "entrepôt," the "Pearl of the Caribbean," whose economy grew dramatically as a direct consequence of the American Revolution and the French-American alliance. Saint-Domingue was the single most profitable colony in the Americas in the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks to staggering production of sugar and coffee and the unpaid labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people. Through Saint-Domingue we see the Franco-American relationship for what it really was and resolve many of the paradoxes of the era. The colony was so focused on producing sugar and coffee that it needed to import food. Mainland North America was the Caribbean's breadbasket, with exports of flour, livestock, salted meats, and timber to Saint-Domingue accounting for a huge portion of U.S. exports. The book chronicles the rapidly changing set of relationships that emerged as the United States developed a trade regime independent of Great Britain and sheds light on the three-way struggle among France, the United States and Haiti to assert, define, and maintain "commercial" sovereignty"-- Provided by publisher. |
