Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (review)

Dobie’s Trading Places is an attempt to explicate the silence—in her words, the “unactualized discourse”—in French literature about the use of African slaves to produce tropical commodities. She traces “the complex relationship between the relative invisibility of the colonial world during a period that lasted until around 1770, and two related but far more prominent eighteenth-century thematics: fascination with ‘Oriental’ culture, and the array of discourses devoted to the relationship between ‘civilized’ Europeans and ‘primitive’ societies exemplified by the indigenous peoples of the Americas” (xi–xii).

This book is rigorously interdisciplinary. It draws extensively from Dobie’s specialty of comparative literature, as well as history, philosophy, political economy, and material culture, to highlight the various displacements that masked the cultural silences surrounding France’s morally tainted enjoyment of luxury goods and other economic benefits derived from a brutal system of colonial slavery. Most scholars of Enlightenment France are aware of the philosophical debates about slavery that culminated in its temporary abolition from the French colonies in 1794. Dobie points out, however, that this discussion of slavery was relatively muted until the late 1760s. Until then, French consumers enjoyed the products of plantation slavery while largely ignoring their provenance.

Dobie’s analysis of this discursive silence is divided into three sections. In Part 1, she demonstrates that French literature tended to examine slavery in the context of exotic Oriental despotism, not the French colonies; consumer goods such as tropical woods and imported textiles received an Oriental veneer. Dobie notes that “the Oriental world was referenced and represented as a point of origin for new textiles, techniques, and styles. In sharp contrast, the important role of Europe’s colonies as producers of raw materials and consumers of cotton textiles long remained largely invisible” (124). This viewpoint allowed French consumers to sidestep the moral question of slave production and their own complicity in that system.

In Part II, Dobie considers the trope of colonial encounters in literary fiction. She argues that, even as contact between French settlers and “natives” became less common in the French Caribbean, “travelogues and fictional narratives continued to portray colonization in the guise of an encounter between Europeans and Amerindians” (165), largely ignoring the development of creolized slave societies. Finally, she examines the genuine critique of slavery that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. This critique was usually couched in the language of political economy and the costs/benefits of slavery; it avoided the moral implications of human forced labor. Even those philosophers who opposed slavery were sometimes tentative in their conclusions.

This extraordinary book reveals Dobie’s skill with the tools of various disciplines. Her ability to extract meaning from both silence and indirection is nuanced and compelling. Her argument that silences reflected a “reluctance to confront or come to terms with a moral issue” is persuasive (6), although we cannot rule out the possibility of ignorance or indifference. Slavery might not have appeared an unqualified evil in a society as hierarchical as Ancien Régime France, in which few enjoyed genuine freedom. However, when philosophes began to consider the possibility of natural rights and liberty for all men, slavery also became a topic of real debate and moral concern.