Slavery in the French Caribbean, 1625-1715

Abstract

The exact relationship between the emergence of the Caribbean plantation slave economy and nascent capitalism is still not clear to many (see, for example, Meillassoux, 1975; 19). The Caribbean plantation colonies were based on African slave labor. They were the creation mostly of the seventeenth century. Capitalism was born from the womb of the feudal mode of production that still dominated most of Europe in the seventeenth century. The problem of the connection between slavery and nascent capitalism complicates the understanding of that stage of the transition from feudalism to capitalism that extends at least to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, when the English seized the asiento slave-delivery contract from the French. Feudal relations of production then still held sway almost everywhere in Europe, including the powerful absolutist France of Louis XIV (1643-1715)-a rising competitor in the Atlantic slave trade and a rapacious exploiter in the Caribbean of African slave labor. At that juncture, capitalist relations of production predominated only in the Netherlands, and perhaps in England after 1689. Nowhere else in the world