Prisons of Rubble and Paper in Colonial Saint-Domingue and Beyond

Abstract

Ample scholarship from Foucault onward has probed the origins of prisons as a key technology for modern state control, but overemphasizes the revolutionary era as a moment of invention. The prison existed much earlier and, as this research demonstrates, gradually became a favored tool among many widely-utilized alternatives. Other historians have explored early modern strategies such as exile, used most often to punish recalcitrant subjects when other strategies did not work. This evidence points to a general pattern whereby these forms of control coexisted and even overlapped in an array of punitive options. I theorize coercive strategies as existing together within a “punitive matrix,” in which imprisonment operated as one among many methods of state control, alongside others such as galley labor, banishment, and corporal punishment. Beginning with evidence from Saint-Domingue in the first half of the eighteenth century about prisons, building out from Jean Clavier’s Léogane in the 1740s. It then turns to the archival sources themselves to understand how colonial administrators described prisons. Read together, this evidence highlights the limited power of prisons, and imprisonment, to control imperial subjects, while elucidating some of the pathways chosen by those subjects.