Book Review

Canada and the United States

The history of Spanish rule in Louisiana has been the object of Gilbert C. Din's close attention for many decades, and this book is his most ambitious and interesting entry on a long list of publications, It is an administrative history directed at specialists, but the work reflects Din's attentive reading of the recent social and cultural explorations of slavery in Louisiana. The result is a well-written, meticulously documented, often vivid account, one with a provocative general thesis that will fail to convince some readers.	1
Resolutely chronological to compensate for the sharp turns in Louisiana's imperial history, Din examines the law of slavery under French rule before the Spanish took over the colony in the 1760s. In a close analysis of the Code Noir, he shows that its supposed protective features were of little weight in the lives of slaves, who were subject to a typical plantation-style production routine under the constant threat of corporal and psychological discipline, although it may have been most harsh in New Orleans in the early days (the 1720s) and somewhat less so after Louisiana became a crown colony in 1731.	2
Din devotes the rest of the book to contrasting conditions under Spanish rule with those in the earlier period. While he acknowledges the long debate about Frank Tannenbaum's thesis that the Spanish dehumanized slaves less than the English and French, he does not engage it directly. Instead, Din is intent on refuting several specific arguments by recent historians of Louisiana.	. . .