Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (review)

As its title suggests, this book challenges the monolithic depiction of free colored society in St. Domingue before the Haitian Revolution by exploring the experiences of two distinct groups: planters and military men. The author documents these two groups' efforts to undermine the limitations that the Eurocreole-dominated colonial society sought to impose on them by analyzing their demographic characteristics, business transactions, political participation, occupational choices, social networks, literacy, and the like. King debunks the stereotypical image of the deprived nonwhite person ruthlessly cut down by the color line, and thus compelled to eke out a living on the margins of Caribbean society. In its place, the author highlights resourceful ex-slaves and free coloreds who cleverly employed various familial, communal, economic and political strategies to carve out a niche for themselves.

The number of free coloreds rose greatly from 6,897 in 1775 to 21,813 in 1788 from the combined effect of high fertility, mounting immigration of enslaved Africans, and improved methods of counting toward the end of the eighteenth century. They made up about one-half of the colony's free inhabitants on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. Although the Code Noir generally treated free nonwhites as one caste, a high degree of inter-racial mixing often invalidated the usefulness of such labels as nègre, mulâtre, quarteron, and griffe. In some cases, lighter-skinned free coloreds chose the road of whitening as a means of social advancement, often in combination with French-sounding surnames and "hijacked" titles of Sieur, Dame and Demoisell. King estimates that free coloreds may have owned as many as 30 percent of all slaves in Saint Domingue, which filled various material and symbolic needs: "as commodity in the market, as kin (pseudo or real), as appurtenance of social respectability, and only sometimes as labor unit in a productive enterprise" (p. 83).

Comprised in the main of persons of mixed African and European ancestry, free colored planters maintained strong personal and business ties to whites and were conservative on economic matters. They began acquiring slaves and land through donations starting around the 1750s, and steadily developed an affluent position by well-orchestrated purchases, sales, and rentals. What they lacked in nobility titles, they made up in material possessions and strategic marriages to whites or similarly well off free coloreds. Their subsequent ability to advance both economically and socially by investing tirelessly but prudently, often at the expense of whites, "was an important social trend that might provide an explanation for the nervousness of the colonial government about the growing power of the free colored population" (p. 133).

The French imported 850,000 enslaved Africans to Saint Domingue between 1629 and 1791. In 1788, slaves numbered 450,000. The scarcity of whites and the perceived lower reward structure of military service shifted much of the colony's public safety and defense needs to loyal ex-slaves and free coloreds. They served on the maréchaussée or local police, enforcing the laws and apprehending deserting soldiers, runaways, smugglers and seditious elements. Free coloreds also supplemented regular French forces at home and overseas when needed, provided security or hunted down maroons for private parties, acted as judges in remote regions, and recruited supernumeraries in their communities.

Free coloreds converted the visibility, status, and leverage gained from these experiences into valuable social and cultural capital. They carefully nurtured fictive kinship and other social ties with other free coloreds. They "went into business, retail or wholesale, on a shoestring, bought and sold land aggressively, and developed land with the expectation of fat profits" (p. 151). Like their rural counterparts, however, they too maximized the non-economic value of their social connections, businesses, religious affiliations, and lifestyle in order to acquire...