| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Doris Garraway. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 412. Cloth $89.95, paper $24.95.
In her dense, imaginative book, Doris Garraway mines "little known" texts about ancien régime French Caribbean societies for information about evolving social structures by examining their "strategic silences, exclusions, and marginalizations" (p. 11). Colonial desire or libertinage, she asserts, shaped an emerging Creolized, multiracial French Caribbean. Garraway deploys multiple definitions of libertine. She usually means the contemporary sense of "immorality, religious heresy, violence and sexual license." But libertinage for Garraway also designates "a libidinal economy undergirding exploitative power relations among whites, free nonwhites, and slaves" (p. 26). To follow her intricate analysis, the reader must keep both definitions in mind.	1
The first three chapters discuss the evolution of Creole society in the seventeenth-century Lesser Antilles. Colonists first subdued the Caribs and then constructed a plantation society based on brutal slavery. The French "colonial desire" was to incorporate Caribs into a French, Christian community; the indigenes demurred. Evangelical failures led missionaries to portray Caribs as aggressors in the early decades of war (1620–1660); so the expropriators blamed the expropriated. Only the second, more technical definition of libertinage can be applied to these first four or five decades when struggles for survival forced colonists to form disciplined militia subject to their governors' martial law authority. Little of the luxe characterizing eighteenth-century libertine Saint-Domingue existed in the seventeenth-century Lesser Antilles. Such luxe is characteristic of a white planter ruling class, which evolved but slowly in the seventeenth century; indeed few planters then resembled the stereotypical sugar magnate.	2
Garraway examines the writings of Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, Etienne Dutertre and Jean-Baptiste Labat to explain the dynamics of plantation society's emergence. She contrasts the development of bourgeois modes of production inherent in plantation agriculture with colonists' aspiration to the social pretensions of French nobles. The challenge for these writers "was to represent insurgent or undisciplined elements of colonial society while downplaying the threat posed to the colonial enterprise and social order" (p. 93). So what do Exquemelin's buccaneers have to do with plantation agriculture based on slavery? On the one hand, their savage violence reminds Garraway of the increasingly obsolescent warrior nobility in Louis XIV's France. On the other hand, the buccaneer leaders eventually became royal officials assisting in the settling of these "brothers of the coast," ancestors of Saint-Domingue's sugar elite (p. 96). Garraway believes the settling process occurred with the assumption of direct royal sovereignty in 1674. In fact, the "golden age" of French flibustiers occurred after 1678, and the buccaneer-turned-sugar-planter dates to after 1700.	3
Garraway analyzes the famous (to historians) books of Dutertre and Labat to show how they urged colonists to adopt the "bourgeois values of private enterprise, hard work and investment over false claims of nobility" (p. 120). She cites Dutertre's misogynist tirade against wasteful, pretentious settler wives. Labat was indeed an apostle of the rational sacrifice of short-term gain for long-term profit, and he attacked wasteful colonial practices and display. Garraway could have made more of the fact that Labat reflected the emerging antagonism between his favorite large planter neighbors, the grands blancs, and the uppity working-class petits blancs. However, for Garraway to speak of a planter class in the late seventeenth century is to exaggerate the number of large sugar makers and their sense of class consciousness.	. . .

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