Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue and the Old Regime

After reading James E. McClellan III's Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue and the Old Regime, one begins to see Saint Domingue in a wholly new way. Science as a tool for colonial development and the slave regime is a topic one does not usually discuss in history courses of slavery in the New World. Indeed, the most common ways to hear of the application of science and industry in slave societies of the Americas is the use of the cotton gin and the development of mechanized sugar mills in the 19th century, so it is important to uncover the various ways in which even during the 18th century, the plantation model in the colonies more closely resembled and took advantage of limited industrialization and science in a way that presaged 19th and 20th century industrial labor.

Indeed, in some cases, cutting edge technology of the 18th century West found its way into Caribbean colonies, particularly the use of the steam engine and locomotives in parts of the British Caribbean and the use of a steam engine pump in L'Artibonite area for irrigation (which ultimately failed, though remains of the Perrier engine can be seen in Haiti today, according to McClellan III). Clearly, the use of science, engineering, applied botany, and medicine were the most important sciences for colonial development, as well as cartography and engineering, which all ensured the survival of a profitable colony, which in turn justified European colonial expansion and the mercantilist policies which supposedly explains why one in eight French were economically tied by trade and profit to the colony of Saint Domingue.

McClellan also uses a worthy introduction and detailed first part to analyze how the context of Saint Domingue's towns, demographics, slaves, and various other factors of colonialism and science impacted Saint Domingue. His extensive coverage of Cap Francois and the other principal cities (Les Cayes, Port-au-Prince) is consistently compared favorably to a French provincial city. And the level of scientific inquiry and advances in medicine and hospital infrastructure in the colony were only rivaled or perhaps surpassed in Dutch Batavia, in Southeast Asia. These scientific missions began with naturalist Jesuit priests in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, who collected useful notes on the flora of Saint Domingue, while future endeavors would emphasise cartography, developing medical infrastructure in the largest cities of the colony (although the author admits that slave healing was usually as efficient or successful as 'Western' medicine, perhaps due to Africans' longer history in the tropics and dealing with tropical climes).

Most of the best scientific inquiry came out of direct state investment and researchers, especially as Saint Domingue was incorporated into French society's scientific interests and collaborations, which included astronomy, engineering (hydraulic and civil engineers collaborated in Saint Domingue, especially with funding by planters, to invest in irrigation projects that successfully fertilized the Cul-de-Sac region, and many other arid or inhospitable parts of the colony), medicine (the widespread use of inoculation for slaves against smallpox in the 18th century stands out), botanical gardens, experimentation with new crops from other regions of the world (think about it, neither sugar nor coffee were native to the Americas, but both became the basic source of wealth for slave plantations), cartography, navigation (learning how to plot one's longitude to aid in sailing, for instance, played a role in expanding trade and success in European shipping around the world), studies of poisons, and the use of science and botany in new industries and trade for the slave society.

It would seem that scientific and medical knowledge reached its zenith with the institutionalization of science among settlers with the Cercle des Philadelphes in 1784, largely forming in response to pseudoscientific 'mesmerism' which had reached popularity with all sectors of Saint Dominguan society. That so many Saint Dominguans took on the pursuit of rational and empirical science seriously against the threat of mesmerism and popular science (such as the ballooning craze of the 1780s that struck Saint Domingue with fervor before being replaced by mesmerism and 'animal magnetism') even if they lacked a background in the field, revealed the degrees to which the pursuit and application of certain branches of scientific study were deemed vital for colonial development and profitability. Of course, the well-known Moreau de Saint Mery appears in this organization, along with several prominent Freemasons (but Freemasonry is proved by McClellan to have played little role in fostering scientific endeavors), as well as the French ministries of the colonies and navy in the decades leading up to the 1780s. Thus, science and colonialism went hand in hand, and colonialism played a role in contributing to scientific communities in Western Europe as an additional source of observations, material, and a practical zone for application of new technologies.

What one wishes to see more of is how slaves themselves approached 'science,' for instance. What of slave healing and medicine? What about slave and African contributions to botany, agriculture, sugar processing and mill technology, or other fields? McClellan states that most sugar mills were powered by animals and humans, although a large minority were water-powered, and windmills were not extensively used (he argues that mathematical fields and pursuits were behind in Saint Domingue when compared to Europe, a factor in explaining some poor surveying and astronomy), but what of black Saint Dominguan contributions to those fields? And in what ways did urban slaves and people of color in the principal cities contribute to the Cercle des Philadelphes and other institutions of learning? Those types of questions will obviously require a great shift in perspective of mathematics and science in precolonial Africa, but deserve an answer. Nonetheless, this is an excellent book illustrating how two significant modern fields, by their very nature, collaborate in European expansion, paving the way for European conquest of Africa (think of the discovery and use of 'Peruvian bark' to treat malaria in the colonies). Tropical pathology, inoculation, and medical advances in general, along with industrialization, became the key fields that aided and abetted European colonialism in the 19th century.

A Glimpse of Saint-Domingue

“In Saint-Domingue everything takes on a character of opulence such as to astonish Europeans."

Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, lawyer and product of colonial Martinique and Saint-Domingue whose Description of the French and Spanish parts of Hispaniola, of epic length, is of great importance to scholars. His writing so far strikes me as essentializing different racial groups in Saint-Domingue as well as thought-provoking for his commentary on social relations, dance, Vaudoux, and the cities and towns of the French colony. Apparently he is a relative of Josephine, wife of Napoleon. I recently read The Civilization That Perished, which is an abridged and translated copy of his aforementioned work. Anywho, the following are some enlightening things about Saint-Domingue, future Haiti.

1. Although lacking universities like the Spanish colonies, cities such as Le Cap (Cap Francais) featured a Royal Society of the Sciences and Arts and other learned organizations, including an active theater scene, where seatings were racially segregated, of course. Slaves were around 2/3 of the population of Le Cap, about 10,000! Port-au-Prince, though made the capital of the colony, was described as a "camp of Tartars" by Moreau de Saint-Méry and seen as lacking the splendor, design, and feel of a more capable and beautiful city, such as Le Cap. In addition to theaters and schools of reading, writing, and arithmetic, colonial cities were tied to the Atlantic world's commerce, via trade with British colonies, Curacao (particularly Jacmel), and other parts of the world. The global economy was becoming more and more connected, and one can see such a phenomenon in Saint-Domingue, where free women of color and slave women wore Madras cloth and (the more fortunate, that is) finer materials from Persia and India. The prospect of learning in Saint-Domingue seemed to have been worsened by the expulsion of the Jesuits in the mid-18th century. With men such as Father Boutin, they were responsible for studying African languages as well as proselytizing among the slaves.

2. Slave culture among African and Creole slaves in Saint-Domingue reveals the deep divisions and gaps in understanding between slaves of different origins. According to Moreau de Saint-Méry, Creole slaves referred to African-born slaves as "horses" or beasts of burden as an insult, and looked down upon them. He also claims that Negroes born in the colony gradually gained less "Negroid" features over time and seems to favor slavery for showing "domestication's" beneficial impact on blacks. Needless to say, such sentiments are highly disturbing and racist, and even though the author abhorred the treatment of pregnant slaves or the blind prejudice against free people of color, his own slaveholding personal interests are never mentioned.

3. He does describe "Vaudoux" as a dance and snake cult from what is now Benin, as well as the chica and calenda dances of slaves. Their skills as musicians also deserve mention, particularly in drums, violins, the banza, as well as their interest in European dances such as the minuet. Overwhelmingly, the portrait of blacks, particularly those from Africa, is one of superstitious, lazy, stupefied by European manufactured products (such as mirrors), poor with arithmetic and unable to give their precise age, ignorant, feeble-minded, polygamous, careless, and thieving. He also claims that 1/4 of all blacks sold into slavery from Africa were accused of witchcraft, the blacks worship fetishes (crude wooden statues, which sound like nkissi figures from Central Africa), the Creole slaves were smarter and preferred for domestic and skilled labour, mulatto slaves were almost exclusively domestic and considered themselves above blacks, and the Africans who spoke about their homeland loved it. He goes on to say that Negroes were capable of full emotions and some showed complete loyalty to their masters, as well as defending the Creole/Kreyol language as better-suited than French for expressing certain things. Interestingly, slaves of Amerindian origin were also illegally present in Saint Domingue, from Natchez, Lousiana, Canada, Guianas, the Caribs, and elsewhere. As mentioned previously,  woman’s headdresses were important; slave women loved undergarments and muslins from India/Persia and slave women shared clothes. I am surprised no one has researched clothing and dress among slave women and free women in Saint-Domingue, it sounds like an understudied but fascinating field for elucidating constructs of gender, class, status, and style in a colony where opulence and excess are always referenced.

4. Some of the problems of today's Haiti clearly arose in the colonial period. Soil erosion, for instance, was already severe by 1791. Epidemics of smallpox and other diseases, as well as earthquakes struck Saint-Domingue, too, including one that destroyed Port-au-Prince in 1770. Droughts, soil exhaustion, epidemics, and earthquakes made the profitable colony of Saint-Domingue a dangerous place and suggests a precarious future. Perhaps this is why Fumagalli asserts that Moreau de Saint-Méry and other French Saint-Dominguans envisioned taking over Spanish Santo Domingo to expand the plantation complex into the eastern half of the island. With increasing soil exhaustion and a sense of impending ecological doom from the plantation system within the small French colony on the island, expansion into Spanish Santo Domingo would be a rational decision. These issues also illustrate how the independent nation of Haiti inherited problems from European colonial destruction of the environment, which has worsened conditions for the independent states of the region. In my opinion, too often has this fact been conveniently 'forgotten' as a contributor to soil erosion, deforestation, and other signs of environmental change.

Naturally, one should be skeptical of many of de Saint-Méry's claims, particularly on the slaves, given his biases and prejudice as a slaveholder himself. However, his text is excessively detailed and informative on the economic, urban, rural, social, environmental, racial, and cultural factors at play. One should read his text with an open mind and analyze some of the postcolonial legacies inherited by Haiti, particularly how the color/caste system created the conditions under which Saint-Domingue would perish as well as those through which it would linger in Haiti. If I ever learn to read French properly, or if de Saint-Méry is ever fully translated, I hope to tackle his description of Spanish Hispaniola. 

Racial Pseudoscience in Saint-Domingue

"The whole being of a mulâtresse is given over to sensual pleasure and the flame of this goddess burns in her heart so as only to be snuffed out with life itself… Even the most inflamed imagination can conceive of nothing that she has not fathomed, concocted, experienced. Her sole vocation is to bewitch the senses, deliver them to the most delicious ecstasies, enrapture them with the most seductive temptations; nature, pleasure’s accomplice, has given her charms, endowments, inclinations, and what is indeed more dangerous, the ability to enjoy such sensations even more keenly than her partners, including some unknown to Sappho."

Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie Française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, (1797): 104.

In France's most valuable slave colony and most profitable territory in the 18th century, racial pseudoscientific theories of explaining and categorizing race emphasized 128 parts. Apparently one's entire racial background could be divised into 128 parts of black or white ancestry, according to Moreau de Saint-Mery, a prominent Creole lawyer and father of a quarteron child with his mulatto mistress. As someone othewise known as a quadroon, Saint-Mery's child would be divided into 3/4 white, 1/4 African or black. Elsewhere, this same prominent white Creole born in Martinique but residing in Saint-Domingue, would lay out several categories of race to divide the colony's population. Due to the increasingly prominent role of certain mixed-race families as slaveholders and the demand for civil rights from France and the white-dominated colonial government, it became more important for whites to measure the racial ancestry of gens de couleur and prevent them from attaining said rights. Thus, the second half of the 18th century witnessed the rise of laws targeting free people of color by mandating they take "African" surnames, cease bearing swords or weapons in public (although they were the reason the militia was able to keep the slave population in check by hunting runaways), and additional punitive laws were enacted by local whites to ensure that the free people of color would not take on the rights of voting for representatives of the colony during the French Revolution's National Assembly in the 1790s.

In spite of attempts by colonial whites reluctant to see free people of African or partial black descent vote and participate in the civic system, they continued to do so and their uprisings and involvement with slave insurgencies ensured the occurrence of the Haitian Revolution, even when it turned against their own slaveholding interests. For example, Julien Raimond, a 'quadroon' from the area of Bainet, argued in favor of dominance of Saint-Domingue from Creole multiracial planters like himself, many of whom were invested in slavery  and tied to the colony while the whites were often absentee planters or came to Saint-Domingue to accumulate wealth quickly and return to France. In addition to advocating for mulatto and free people of color rights based on economic and local ties, they also defended male rights in the political discourse by asserting their masculinity, which Mimi Sheller has researched further into 19th century independent Haiti. The above excerpt from Saint-Mery's tome on French Saint-Domingue exemplifies the feminization of multiracial Saint-Dominguans, regardless of gender. Males were therefore incapable of taking on political rights extended to white men because their hybrid descent was equated with femininity in a political area rooted in patriarchal notions of governance. Their alleged depraved morality and physical qualities as mixed-race people with the strength and moral weaknesses of blacks deprived them of proper citizenship since the mulattoes lived for sexual gratification and suffered from innately effeminate features. One still sees this stereotype of la mulata in Spanish Latin American literature and elsewhere, where multiracial black women face the Jezebel stereotype based on these earlier notions of black women's sexuality.

Anyway, several categories of degrees of mixed populations were devised that defy reason. Even when dealing with people of predominantly white European background and phenotypically 'white,' Moreau de Saint-Mery insisted that these light-skinned 'blacks' were still distinguishable based on some inferior trait or dark tint to the skin, an example of the extent of racial prejudice on a so-called rational or scientific mind. The following are some of the several terms used in the taxonomy of the population of Saint-Domingue:

1. negre and African, or black, was reserved for people of fully 128 parts African or black. Negroes or blacks were usually the darkest skinned with the coarsest hair textures. However, not all enslaved Africans were necessarily Negre and distinctions were recognized by whites and some Africans for groups like the Peul or Fulani of West Africa. Indeed, Sylviane Diouf in Servants of Allah describes one incidence of a literate Muslim slave referring to what were likely Fulani Muslims as "mulattoes with long hair." Michael Gomez, author of Black Crescent, describes the aforementioned long-haired mulattoes as "Arabo-Berbers" like the Moors and Tuareg of West Africa, however. Regardless, not all Africans arriving in Saint-Domingue were categorized as "black." Diouf also suggests that many enslaved Muslims, especially educated ones, throughout the Americas, were more often linked with an "Arab" identity, partly to perpetuate notions of black intellectual inferiority.

2. mulatre would be used for someone half-black and half-white, ideally 64 parts black, 64 parts white. Of course, free people of color in Saint-Domingue included some people recognized as entirely 'black,' and others were all generalized as "mulatre" regardless of their actual ancestry. Some trace the origins of the word to Arabic or Latin for "mule," the offspring between a horse and a donkey. Moreover, this etymology likely influenced notions of effeminate and inferior 'mongrelized' populations who were often stereotyped as being infertile or incapable of producing viable offpsring. Despite all the readily available evidence from multiracial families around them, many whites continued to believe in pseudo-scientific theories of inferior bodies of mixed-race individuals.

3. quarteron or quadroon was widely used for those who were 1/4 black or African. Julien Raimond, for instance, was one well-known Saint-Dominguan planter of this background. Alexandre Dumas, illustrious 19th century French writer, was also the product of a mulatto and white, a quadroon. Many of these types of multiracial individuals could often pass as white, although some, like Dumas, still had the "kinky" hair that indicated black descent.

4. cctoroon or metis in Saint-Domingue referred to someone who was 1/8 black and 7/8 white. The well-known case of Homer Plessy in Louisiana was an instance of a metis of partial Saint-Dominguan roots whose case against Jim Crow will forever be remembered.

5. mamelouc, derived from Mameluk in Arabic, the word for Turkish slave soldiers used in the Arab Islamic world, was a less common term for a group of multiracial people 120 parts white, 8 parts black. As you can image, how anyone could be categorized into groups like these is beyond reason.

6. griffe would be the term for the offspring of a mulatto and a black, so about 1/4 white and 3/4 black in the 128 parts system. Some scholars, such as Colin Dayan, link the origin of this term to the animal kingdom, perhaps describing the hair texture of such people as resembling that of a griffon of some sort. Romaine-la-prophetesse, an early leader of a slave uprising in southern Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, was either a 'griffe' or mulatto and can be read about in this post.

7. marabou, a term that lacks clear meaning, was used to refer to dark-skinned multiracial people with less "Negroid" facial features or non-kinky hair textures. This word is still used in Haiti, as I have been labelled "marabou" by Haitians in Florida. The marabou would be somewhere between 40-48 parts white, the remainder black. Like the griffe, their facial features have great variety but are supposedly lighter-skinned on average than the griffe. How the hell anyone could differentiate degrees of mixed heritage like this is, again, beyond my capacity.

7. Sangmele or Sang-mele derives from the union of a white and a quarteron and would be overwhelmingly of European descent, such as 124 or 125 parts white.

8. sacatra referred to someone 1/8 white and 7/8 black and likely the offspring of a griffe and a black.

9. blanc referred to someone fully white, although this could be relative too since self-proclaimed 'whites' in Spanish Santo Domingo and Spain's credentials as full-blooded whites was challenged by Moreau and others.

10. grimelle or grimeau was another term used to refer to light-skinned multiracial people with strong "Negroid" facial features, the opposite of marabou. Ideally, the grimeau phenotype would likely coincide with metis or quarteron categories for Moreau, although skin color varies so greatly it is impossible to say.

11. jaune or grimaud are terms for 'yellow' and fair-skinned people

12.and many more exist for various types of facial features and hair textures in Haiti

Some of the terms have been abandoned or changed. For instance, marabou seems to imply some connection to Taino or East Indian admixture, particularly long hair. The marabou phenotype is widely celebrated in terms of Haitian female aesthetics while dark skin is still denigrated like elsewhere. Throughout Haitian history, conflicts between dark and light, black and mulatto, remained a fixture of postcolonial legacies that fueled civil war, poor distribution of resources, and class tensions. Serious scholarship has unveiled excessively the role of color and class in post-revolutionary Haiti. I recommend From Dessalines to Duvalier by David Nicholls.