Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture

Abstract

For scholars of Britain and its eighteenth-century empire, the relative invisibility, at least until very recent times, of colonial themes and the issue of slavery in the French Empire in French literary criticism and historiography is curious. These are obsessive themes in British discourse, then and now. As Madeleine Dobie points out in this penetrating and ambitious essay on both the presence and the absence of discussions of African slavery in the eighteenth century, the recent turn towards the study of colonialism in French culture has been overwhelmingly focused on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French Empire in the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, by almost any measure, the importance of colonial goods and colonial wealth in metropolitan France was greater in the period of the first French Atlantic Empire than when the empire was concentrated on north and West Africa. This modern relegation of the West Indies to a secondary place in scholarly discussion is mirrored in literature and commentary produced in the eighteenth century. The French not only wrote much less about slavery in the West Indies than did Britons they also tended to place slavery, when they did write about it, in an orientalist framework and located in North Africa and the Middle East.