This book is the first English translation of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s exhaustive eighteenth-century description of the French slave colony of Saint-Domingue. First published in 1797-98, Moreau’s Description de la partie française de l’isle de Saint-Domingue provides a richly diverse picture of that society on the eve of the black revolution from which the independent nation of Haiti emerged. Although the present translation has been drastically edited (to roughly one-seventh of the original text), the more significant sections for the historian or student of colonial Saint-Domingue—those dealing with social structure, culture (both black and white), and the society’s peculiar class, race, and caste characteristics—have been substantially left intact, as are those for the major cities of Cap Français and Port-au-Prince. Material covering the parishes, the multitude of small bourgs throughout the countryside, as well as slave resistance, has been selectively treated and organized into additional chapters.
The arrangement of the material, and the transitional editorial passages where substantial omissions have been made, thus provide a concise yet meaningful presentation of such a magisterial work. Also, the translator has included a brief informative supplement touching on aspects of slavery omitted by Moreau de Saint-Méry. By rendering this major historical source on prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue in English, albeit in abridged form, the author has made an evident contribution to the general field of colonial history. However, a note on the translation itself is in order. The translator’s tendency to oversimplify in English an often convoluted eighteenth-century French mode of expression, in addition to frequent lexical and morphological errors, has led to detracting infelicities and, on occasion, significant distortions in meaning (and therefore of Moreau’s reality) when compared with the original text. Although the present book stands more as a popularization of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s monumental work than as a rigorous and scholarly translation of it, its usefulness for students as a general introduction to colonial Saint-Domingue is not necessarily diminished, and it much deserves to be read.
