Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (review)

Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans has generated a panoply of new books. Shannon Dawdy's Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans was being written when the storm hit, and Katrina had much to do with the final version. The nightmare image of a virtually lawless city that the media projected in 2005 reinforced Dawdy's intention of deconstructing that kind of portrait, which has characterized popular images of 'The Big Easy' from its earliest days. Focusing on New Orleans' transformations from military garrison to rogue Creolized metropolis, and then to Spanish possession, Dawdy considers the years of French dominance (1718–1769), employing historical ethnography and an analysis of the city's various avatars as a colonial site. Dawdy's concept of rogue colonialism operates in tandem with mētis, the practical knowledge, and flexible strategies the French frontier required. As these operations proceeded, Dawdy notes, they fostered creolization, which she defines as the birth of a new native society (p. 5). She highlights three principal figures: the engineer, the creole, and the rogue, who respectively represent the Enlightenment, creolized culture and rogue colonialism. Dawdy also turns her attention to eighteenth-century France, where writers and philosophes were sketching in an image of Louisiana as a site of disorder. Writers actually in the city, such as the nun Marie-Madeline Hachard, the landowner Jean-Charles Padel, and the businessman J.B. Prėvost testified to life there, and mapmakers, sailors, and rogue entrepreneurs added their accounts to the legend of Louisiana circulating in France, most notoriously in Abbė Prevost's Manon Lescaut, the most read book about the colony of the century. Dawdy's study is richly populated with colorful civic rogues, bawdy and/or elegant women, and filbustiers; she posits the latter as the originators of rogue privateers who eventually were key to the complicated patterns of hemispheric trade, which followed currents and winds to link the key cities of Havana, Vera Cruz, St. Pierre, and New Orleans. She also points out that people of color sometimes had quite important roles; Louis Congo, for instance, was the black executioner of the colony, which administered its unusual laws arbitrarily and often, corruptly, as the interests of the King gave way in legal codes to those of the plantation owners, which meant more misery for the enslaved. Along with Hachard, Adrien Pauger (the creator of the city's grid), and Congo, Dawdy highlights the lives of Father LeMaire, a scientist and satirist; Elizabeth Real, an innkeeper, and St. Antoine, an African convert. These 'lifelets' animate her overriding 'rogue' discourse, and put a human face on complex historical developments. Their stories also lead to the concluding event of the era, the failed revolt of 1768 against the Spanish under Governor Ulloa. who made the mistake of attempting to curtail lucrative smuggling activities. Employing a vibrant style, Dawdy animates a painstakingly woven social, cultural, and economic tapestry of the history of French Louisiana, one that deserves to hang in a place of honor in the years to come.