Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic by Jennifer Palmer (review)

Intimate Bonds is, at its core, a book about family and what makes a Rochelais family when slavery, long prohibited in France but allowed in the new overseas colonies, returns as a factor in French family life in the 17th and 18th centuries. Palmer's deeply researched volume uses notarial records, letters, and other sources to present microhistories of enslaved women and men brought to La Rochelle on France's west coast, and white colonists grappling with the distance and disruptions of colonialism. Through these methodical examinations of the problems caused and questions raised by trans-Atlantic colonial family life, Intimate Bonds illuminates how slaves and free people of color challenged the hardening racial and social hierarchies of the eighteenth century.

Palmer, a historian of France and gender, organizes the book around six core questions, with the first, third, and fifth chapters examining case studies while the others use laws and notarial records to sketch broader trends. Chapter one uses the letters of a ship captain-turned-labor camp profiteer Paul Belin de Marais to examine the limits of interracial and free-slave paternalism. Palmer then traces how the beneficiaries of slavery pressured the French state to allow them to keep enslaved individuals in their metropolitan households. Chapter three uses the travails of a Rochelais family—the husband traveled to Saint-Domingue to manage the labor camp but the wife was better at business—to explore the physical separation inherent in colonial economics. This case study leads to an analysis of how money and power mediated the relationship between white women and people of color. Surnames had their own politics, as they could be recognitions of paternity and the French state tried to force children of color to adopt different surnames than their fathers and half-siblings–something the Fleauriaus discovered in their divergent definitions of "family." The final chapter returns to the efforts of the French state to register and monitor residents of color during the eighteenth century, showing how free men of color protected themselves through self-depiction as good patriarchs. Palmer concludes with a detailed epilogue that utilizes business correspondence to sketch the Haitian Revolution's impact on the Belin camp, discusses the revolutions' devastating impact on Rochelais commerce, and points to the revolutionary years as a key time of racialization.

This work is part of an expanding dialogue regarding race and slavery in the French Atlantic and also serves as a fascinating addition to work on slavery, race, and gender in the Caribbean. Sue Peabody's and Malick Ghachem's legal studies, Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard's tracing of the Tinchant family, Emily Clark's and Arlette Gautier's careful examinations of women of color's navigations outside, and inside, of slavery are important precedents. Palmer ties these Atlantic conversations in with work on gender and family in ancien régime France in an insightful and important way, one grounded in rigorous examination of primary sources including contracts, wills, bills of sale, and letters. Above all, Palmer's frame of intimacy—that men and women, masters and servants, old and young, slave and free, poor and rich lived in close, continuing proximity—is a crucial reminder to those working on the early modern.

The scope of the analysis is typically the decisions and actions of French women and men involved in the colonial project, though the perspective of people of color is also incorporated. This dual perspective is useful in showing the contradictions and transformations of colonialism through the eighteenth century and in revealing how the colonized and the enslaved challenged the system. For example, Belin, the ship captain from the first chapter, leaned on personal favors to build a relationship with Alexis, the enslaved driver (crew foreman), who was also the head indigo refiner. After Belin retired to France, he installs a white, wage-earning manager to oversee the camp. Alexis, having received his position and some social capital (though not...