Talini, Giulio (2024) Bodies of Expertise: Economic Knowledge, Colonial Development, and State Sovereignty in the French Caribbean (1759-1791). [Tesi di dottorato]

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Abstract

This research investigates the practices of economic knowledge, expertise, development, and imperial sovereignty in the French Caribbean between 1759 and 1791. To do so, it will examine the political economies elaborated by the Chambers of Commerce of the three most dynamic French Atlantic ports of the period (Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Nantes) and by the Chambers of Agriculture of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe in order to promote their different views on how to favour the growth of the French West Indies. These semi-public institutions addressed their letters, mémoires, and deliberations to a third actor, the state and, primarily, the Secretary of State of the Navy, directly or via their deputies at the Bureau of Commerce. Firstly, the study of the social background and the cultural orientations of the imperial elites inside the agrarian and commercial Chambers will demonstrate how, as of the foundation of the Caribbean Chambers in 1759 and the crisis following the Seven Years’ War, provinces, colonies, ports, ship owners, merchants, captains, and planters participated in a polycentric and often transimperial creation of economic knowledge about the governance of the French Antilles. By looking into merchant and planter economic cultures, this spatial and institutional standpoint will allow us to reframe French imperial political economy’s epistemology, geography, and practices beyond the exclusive focus on enlightened reformers, showing the importance of local and empirical knowledge in the making of colonial economic thought and policy. Secondly, the evolving state-civil society collaboration between the French mercantilist monarchy and the colonial and metropolitan Chambers will offer new insights into imperial state-building at the end of the Old Regime, a period of entangled Atlantic transformations. Through the multi-scaled perspective of the Chambers, the deputies sitting in the Bureau of Commerce, the Naval Ministry, and the international context, it will be possible, on the one hand, to refute the “colonial machine” model and, on the other, to observe how the French crown sought to process and rise above the “constitutionalised” but still interested advice of traders and plantation owners to affirm state sovereignty in overseas economic regulation. In particular, the bureaucratisation of the deputies elected by the commercial and agrarian Chambers led to the emergence of a new kind of more technical and “impartial” economic experts in the service of the sovereign. Reacting to this attempt at administrative centralisation, the members of the Chambers radicalised their racial and economic self-identifications, undermining the cohesion of the French empire.

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