La ville aux iles, la ville dans l'ile: Basse-Terre et Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 1650-1820 (review)

In this handsome, sturdy edition, Anne Pérotin-Dumon impressively covers the literature in English, French, and Spanish and asks us to reconsider the applicability of the "plantation model"—which stresses the pivotal role of the colonial sugarcane complex in structuring life and land—to the complexities of Antillean life. True, "plantation society," as a socioeconomic structure based on enslaved Africans, Europeans owners, and large-scale production of cotton or sugar, flourished from Brazil to the southern United States. Yet even so, in more than one region, and perhaps especially in the Lesser Antilles and Guadeloupe, creolization and mestization began early on to blur the African-European dichotomy, and the development of ports from simple shipping wharfs to coastal cities shifted the focus from sugar plantation to city and, eventually, from the insular Caribbean to the Atlantic world.

Between the introduction and the closing epilogue, Pérotin-Dumon covers in a most detailed fashion the trajectory of Guadeloupe's history up to 1820: the beginnings of the French settlement in Guadeloupe, the importance of piracy to those origins, the emergence of the administrative capital of Basse-Terre and the economic center of Pointe-à-Pitre in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the social geography of the two places, and their attempts at becoming "centers of civilization" in the face of the institution of slavery. Brilliant illustrations fill the spaces between words, and thick pages of appendixes supply documents that amplify the book's coverage.

An intriguing duality runs through the account, which begins with the island itself. Guadeloupe is practically two islands joined only by a narrow strip of land. For all the world, it resembles a butterfly in flight. Assuming the butterfly, for its own reason, is headed north, the right wing is a flat limestone plateau of sedimentary rock, and the left is the variegated top of a volcanic intrusion. On the left wing, the administrative capital of Basse-Terre faces the sheltered Caribbean, with mountains to it back. On the edge of the right wing, the commercial capital of Pointe-á-Pitre stretches more expansively on flat limestone, its docks protruding into a sheltered bay that eventually opens on to an Atlantic that contains its dark past and its beckoning future. On Guadeloupe, Pérotin-Dumon concludes in her reflexive epilogue, the past of Europe and Africa join in the quoted words of Antillean poet Derek Walcott, "like the halves of a fruit," seamed in its own juice both sweet and bitter. A pleasure to the hand and a delight to the eye (even to the reviewer's blurry French), the author's impressive, near monumental account awaits the scholarly harvest.