Description: By the late 1700s, half the free population of Saint Domingue was black and exercised a high degree of social, economic, and physical mobility. Covering the period 1776-1791, this study offers the most comprehensive portrait to date of Saint Domingue's free black elites on the eve of the colony's transformation into the republic of Haiti.
Brief description: STEWART R. KING is an associate professor of history at Mount Angel Seminary, St. Benedict, Oregon.
Review Quotes:
King has many fresh things to say about free-colored marriages and families, manumission practices, entrepreneurship, housing, religiousness, color consciousness, godparenthood, status aspirations, social mobility, and sexual behavior. . . . Saint Domingue produced one of the wealthiest classes of free-colored slaveholders in the history of the Americas. In this assiduously researched volume, King succeeds admirably in achieving a stated goal of bringing depth and complexity to a subject too easily ignored or glossed over by historians of slavery in the Americas.
--Journal of Social History