Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society

by Cécile Vidal

Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cecile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city's development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories.

Drawing on New Orleans's rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city's streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana's capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America's most intriguing city.

Genres: History

552 pages, Hardcover

Published June 17, 2019

Reviews

[Michelle Merlo · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the sheer volume and content of this text is proof that Vidal knows their stuff, the language used is abysmal. I half-expected it to have been published in the 70s or 80s, for the lack of social awareness of inclusive language. While I recognize and appreciate historians’ individual prerogative in writing objectively as to remain reflective of the time period, there is zero need for this flippant dismissal of more culturally sensitive language. For one tiny brief example on a random page I flipped to: “To more efficiently hunt down runaways, who tended to gather in the woods surrounding New Orleans, insulting passersby, and pillaging plantations at night, officials ordered masters to declare escaped slaves at the office of the Superior Council’s Clerk.”
With all due respect to what is clearly a fascination with the colonial beginnings of New Orleans, it came as no surprise to find the author is white and French. However, even the tiniest allowance of leeway based solely on a disconnect from the horrors of the American slavery system is too generous. I gave this (albeit 100 pages too long) hefty academic work 2 stars. I am kind.

[Macy Lites · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a hefty 500-some pages I read it senior year for History 127A - The French Empire. This book is an intensive analysis of the history of New Orleans and argues that the city functioned more as a Caribbean port city than an American one.

I learned a lot from this book from how the indigenous Natchez were forcibly removed from the area via war and displacement. After the removal of indigenous people, the levee and the streets of the French Quarter that made up New Orleans as an attractive place to visit. It’s fascinating to see the many different layers of social relationships between New Orleans’ diverse population of French undesirables, entrepreneurs, tradesmen, sailors, enslaved people, landowning elites, and what would become the Creole population.

I also used this book to help me write my paper on the Quadroon Balls later in the quarter and this book served as a great foundational piece to understand New Orleans as a export economy, an extension of the French Caribbean network, and a unique breeding ground for social relations that exist nowhere else.

[Nikhil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic close examination of New Orleans' origins and social development as an outpost within the French Caribbean. Highly recommended for its details and strong arguments.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vidal is a well-known historian of the early modern French empire, and this latest book does not disappoint! She utilizes the increasingly popular field of "Greater Caribbean" history and urban slavery to contextualize eighteenth-century New Orleans. By re-imagining New Orleans as not an entirely "US" space, she allows the readers to consider its distinct elements, including the early significance of African enslavement. Per usual, her prose is clear and entertaining, and there are many passages that I very much enjoyed. For those familiar with the recent historiography of New Orleans, the Greater Caribbean, and/her her other works (in French and English) the book is going to be somewhat repetitive. Theoretically, she really is just joining other calls for New Orleans' inclusion as a Caribbean space. Still, I think she does this primarily for a US audience, or for a French audience, who are perhaps less familiar with recent trends in imperial histories.

Overall, this is a great read in content and style, and is important an important monograph for those interested in more historically sound accounts of early New Orleans.

[Sam Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vidal's work is very detail-oriented and academic. This is another piece that I recommend to historians of both American slavery, and New Orleans history. The information is packaged a bit densely, but it is an extraordinarily enriching read.