Partnerships in the coffee slave economy of Saint-Domingue, 1775 -1797

• Grant number: 19/11090-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): September 01, 2019
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of America
• Principal Investigator: Rafael de Bivar Marquese
• Grantee: Juliana Cristina Zanezi
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This undergraduate research project aims to analyze the slave coffee economy of Saint-Domingue by a preliminary investigation of the business partnerships established between small investors for the foundation and/or exploration of coffee farms. Several factors aid the noticeable growth of coffee production in this French colony, responsible, at the eve of the enslaved Revolution (1791), for over half of the product's worldwide offer. Among them is the fact that the activity was open for owners with few slaves. However, the specific conditions with which these small investors participated in the development and reproduction of coffee cultivation in Saint-Domingue, i.e., the financing forms of the coffee industry, have not yet been investigated by historiography. Thus, this project's main goal is to verify some of the designs of these investment patterns through the investigation of the business contracts signed among small coffee investors between the mid-1770s and the year of 1797. To this end, the document corpus shall be composed by the contracts registered in the notarial records corresponding to the parishes (quartiers) from the North and West parts of the Saint-Domingue island between 1755 and 1797.The documents to be analyzed in this investigation were collected by professor Rafael Marquese at the Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence, France), in June and July 2017, within the aforementioned project on the global history of coffee. At this occasion, notarial records from the main coffee parishes of the North of Saint-Domingue were consulted, as identified in the famous report by Moreau de Saint Méry on the general state of the colony in 1789. From a total of 45 notarial books, the professor selected the records that referred to the coffee business, collecting the document base by photographic reproductions - around 500 notarial acts -, which provides the starting point for this study. Through the transcription, reading, and analysis of these voluminous and profitable sources, we intend to understand the intricated functioning of the coffee society and its misadventures to obtain investments and credit.