"Between France and the Antilles": The Commercial Assimilation of the American Revolution in Saint-Domingue, 1784-1785

Malick W. Ghachem

This paper is an effort to approach the unwieldy concept of the "Atlantic Revolution" from the perspective of commercial relations between the United States and Saint-Domingue. A long and irrepressible tradition of illegal trade tied the region that became the New World's first independent republic to the Caribbean colony that would become its second. The conclusion of the American revolutionary war provided France an opportunity to recalibrate its deteriorating relationship with Saint-Domingue. The abandonment of mercantilism in 1784 served to immunize the French empire from a replay of the forces that had led to the dismemberment of its British counterpart. Locked in a public relations battle with the metropolitan chambers of commerce, the creole agitators of Saint-Domingue played into the monarchy's hands by assimilating the American Revolution as an essentially commercial rather than ideological event. But the colonists' bid to locate autonomy in a sense of economic community with the metropole collapsed into the even more paradoxical assumption that attacks upon the slave trade were consistent with the defense of plantation slavery.

[WP # 99026]