The Revolutionary Atlantic of Elizabeth Beauveau and Marie Rose Poumaroux: commerce, vulnerability, and U.S. connections to the French Atlantic, ca. 1780-1860
Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
“The Revolutionary Atlantic” examines how women connected to transatlantic commerce maneuvered within and were shaped by the Haitian Revolution and the inter-imperial wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues that revolutionary tumult in Saint Domingue provided an opening for businesswomen to acquire and expand their commercial authority in local and Atlantic markets. Women of color were important economic players in Saint Domingue with networks that stretched horizontally and vertically to encompass laundresses and couturières as well as prominent merchants and political and military figureheads. In the post-revolutionary landscape, some of these women resettled in the United States, St. Thomas, France, and elsewhere. Businesswomen of color who fled independent Haiti to the United States faced local resistance to their economic authority. Women drew on their far-reaching financial and affective ties they forged during the Haitian Revolution to resist the hardening of racial and gender lines in places like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania after 1804. ☐ Historians have traditionally explored the ramifications of the Haitian Revolution on United States’ politics and formulations of race. But as this dissertation asserts, racial politics of the United States could shape understandings of race and family for French and Dominguan men and women in the diaspora and back in France. Animus toward the “mulâtress,” the “quadroon,” and people of African descent permeated political discourse in early republic Philadelphia and possibly influenced the intimate, economic, and political decisions of (white) French exiles. For exiles of color married to or borne of white men, relocating to an area hostile to interracial unions could mean public censure or being cast aside, secreted away, and made illegitimate. Whereas the household and the family in pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue formed two institutions wherein women of color could challenge racial categories, the post-revolutionary era posed new challenges, especially as family members were strewn across a diaspora. Families contested the meanings of their relationship across imperial and national boundaries, adding new layers of complication for women and children of color seeking recognition from white fathers and partners. What we see in their struggle for recognition and self-representation stands as an allegory for Haiti’s broader fight to assert sovereignty over its soil in the nineteenth century.