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Citazione bibliografica

Giulio Talini, Bodies of Expertise: Economic Knowledge, Colonial Development, and State Sovereignty in the French Caribbean (1759-1791)

  • Abstract
    This research investigates the practices of economic knowledge, expertise, and development in the French Caribbean between 1759 and 1791. To do so, it will examine the well-documented political economies elaborated by the Chambers of Commerce of the three most dynamic French Atlantic ports of the period (Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Nantes) and by the Chambers of Agriculture of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe in order to promote their different views on how to favour the growth of the French West Indies. Availing themselves of their theoretical and practical experience on commercial and economic matters as well as of their local, imperial, and transimperial networks, these semi-public institutions addressed their letters, memoires, and deliberations first and foremost to a third actor, the state and, primarily, the Secretary of State of the Navy, either directly or via their deputies at the Bureau of Commerce. Firstly, the study of the social background and the cultural orientations of the imperial elites inside the agrarian and commercial Chambers will demonstrate how, as of the foundation of the Caribbean Chambers in 1759 and the imperial crisis following the Seven Years’ War, provinces, colonies, ports, ship owners, merchants, captains, and planters participated in a polycentric and often innovative creation of economic knowledge about the governance French Antilles, combining raw information, group interests, technical know-how, and the “science of commerce”. This spatial and institutional standpoint will allow us to reframe French imperial political economy’s epistemology, geography, and practices beyond the exclusive focus on enlightened reformers. Secondly, the evolving state-civil society collaboration between the French mercantilist monarchy and the colonial and metropolitan Chambers will offer new insights into imperial state-building at the end of the Old Regime, a period of entangled Atlantic transformations. Through the multi-scaled perspective of the Chambers’ localities, the deputies sitting in the Bureau of Commerce, the Naval Ministry, and the international context, it will be possible, on the one hand, to reject the “colonial machine” model and, on the other, to observe how the French crown sought, as a political experiment, to process, filter, and rise above the “constitutionalised” but still interested advice of traders and plantation owners to affirm imperial sovereignty and the public interest in overseas economic regulation. However, the consultation of the mercantile and colonial elites would continue to be central to policy-making until the French Revolution, even though the engagement of merchants and planters in the Chambers contributed to radicalising the divergent ideological and identitarian representations of the “négociant patriote” and the patriotic, white, and French-American “habitant”.