Atlantic Antecedents: Before the “Haitian Turn”

Historians of France sometimes refer to recent writings on colonial Saint-Domingue and on slavery as part of a new “colonial turn” in the field. However, US-based historians of France have long been interested in these topics. In this introduction, I draw attention to some trailblazing articles of the early 2000s on the French Caribbean to revisit a range of innovative approaches toward studying this history.

FHS’s first issue of the millennium included an extremely important early example of Atlantic history, as R. Darrell Meadows traced migration networks around the Atlantic following the French and Haitian Revolutions. FHS’s next issue featured three pedagogical essays on how to integrate colonial history into the teaching of French history. Alongside contributions by Robert Forster and Alice Conklin, John Garrigus offered an extremely useful guide for teaching the Haitian and French Revolutions together.

In 2002, Sue Peabody explored religious history in the Antilles over the longue durée, focused on enslaved people’s complex appropriation of Catholicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 2006-2007, even as more historians became interested in Haiti, articles in FHS highlighted other Antilles as well as the lives of Black people in the metropole. The Fall 2006 issue included John Savage’s study of poisoning cases against enslaved people in Restoration-Era Martinique, while the April 2007 issue included Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss’s innovative research on the 1831 Saint-Pierre slave uprising in Martinique and Dwain Pruitt’s using archives creatively to illuminate the lives of Black people in eighteenth-century Nantes.

Together these articles help illuminate the multifaceted history of innovative research on the French Caribbean by Anglophone historians. As FHS continues to publish even more work on slavery and the Antilles, it is well worth revisiting these and other older works.

—Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall