ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Racializing Access to Bread: Grain Policy and Free People of Color in 1760s Saint-Domingue

• In Event: Food, Scarcity and Knowledge in Colonial and Atlantic Worlds (1500-1800). Panel N. 2

English Abstract

In 1762, free people of color in Cap-Français were prohibited from purchasing wheat and bread by the city’s judge, in what was then the economic capital of the French colony of Saint-Domingue. This decision was issued at the height of a grain shortage brought on by the British blockade during the Seven Years’ War. In a colonial economy whose agriculture was entirely oriented toward export production, the colony depended heavily on wheat imports from the metropole and from the British colonies in North America. These two ordinances formed part of a broader set of policing measures aimed at regulating and monitoring the actors involved in the wheat market—merchants, bakers, and consumers. They reveal the tension between the authorities’ efforts to ensure the provisioning of an urban population in a moment of crisis and the structural constraints of a dependent economy that sharply limited colonial officials’ room for maneuvering. They also illustrate how, over the course of the Seven Years’ War, racist ideas crystallized and began to shape political decision-making. The relationship between racial discourse and policy has already been the subject of several studies—particularly regarding militias or sumptuary regulations —but never in connection with food policy. This paper proposes to examine how the growing economic presence of free people of color in the urban economy, together with the rise of racial discourse, influenced economic policymaking in a context of food vulnerability.

Author

• Camille Cordier, Université Lyon 2