America. The “generative fusion,” or creative adaptation, that Philip Morgan argues was characteristic of eighteenth-century Caribbean culture was most apparent in these dynamic urban places. It was in cities and towns that some of the transformations in race, and indeed gender, that we will be concerned with in this text were most obvious.1
Towns in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were not mere appendages to the plantation world. They were “electric transformers,” to employ Fernand Braudel’s metaphor for early modern towns, places that “increase[d] tension, accelerate[d] the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge[d] human life.”2 Colonists in these cities found few if any of the institutions that controlled the sexual, economic, or religious behavior of European urban residents. Urban spaces were also liberating places for free and enslaved people of color, who often found more autonomy, a wider set of social relationships, and greater earning power than in rural areas. Free women, both black and white, found it easier in towns to re-create themselves as people of cultural and economic importance.
These New World towns were part of a general urbanizing trend in the eighteenth-century British and French Atlantic Worlds.3 Like provincial towns in Britain and France, they had shops and theaters, markets and commercial exchanges, and new housing developments. Yet these places were even more dynamic than their European counterparts. They had high mortality rates and a constant flux of migrants, merchants, soldiers, and slaves. The pulse of the Atlantic trade made the towns of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica into sites of continual reinvention, as new arrivals struggled to adapt to a new and sometimes bewildering environment.
Late eighteenth-century maps of Saint-Domingue’s chief cities, like René Phélipeau’s 1785 map of Cap Français and its surroundings, reveal an extraordinary vision of rectilinear order and social sophistication (Figure 9).4 Such images make it easy to remember that Port-au-Prince, Saint-Domingue’s capital, was a critical stop for Charles Marie de La Condamine’s 1735 expedition to determine the shape of the earth, and that the first hot air balloon ascension in the Americas occurred in Cap Français, the colony’s major port city. Descending closer, the image of enlightened urban sociality becomes more impressive. Cap Français had a theater that could seat fifteen hundred spectators. Cap Français was, moreover, just one of the eight towns in Saint-Domingue with theaters. Actors and musicians from Europe regularly toured the colony, performing the latest plays from Paris. Cap Français and Port-au-Prince had full-time professional troupes and orchestras. Saint-Domingue was also blessed with many booksellers, forty-four Masonic lodges, several public parks and squares, five subscription-based reading clubs, three Vauxhalls (or pleasure gardens), and a scientific academy that included corresponding members like Benjamin Franklin.5
Figure 9. “Plan de la Ville du Cap François et de ses Environs Dans l’Isle St. Domingue, Nicolas Poncé.” © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.
But this portrait of the colony as a center of Enlightenment activity is misleading. For one thing, urban sociability came late to Saint-Domingue. Many of these institutions were established in Saint-Domingue as an attempt by French authorities after 1763 to create “civilized” public spaces binding Saint-Domingue’s colonists closer to France. Second, the colony’s towns became sizeable only in the 1770s and 1780s. Cap Français, for example, had around forty-four hundred residents in 1771, including slaves, and tripled to fifteen thousand by 1788, still counting slaves.6 Third, although Saint-Domingue had three regional capitals—Cap Français, Port-au-Prince, and Les Cayes, on the southern coast—it was no more extensively urbanized than Jamaica. This proliferation of capitals was largely a function of how difficult it was to travel around the colony and in particular reflected the military vulnerability of the northern coast. Counting the population of these regional capitals, about 5 to 6 percent of Saint-Domingue lived in cities, a number about half of the 10 to 12 percent of Jamaica’s population that lived in towns by the middle of the 1780s. When Saint-Domingue’s roughly fifty parish towns are counted, with populations of about three hundred apiece, however, the two colonies are roughly equivalent in people in urban or semiurban settings, with about 10 to 12 percent of people living in urban or semiurban places.7
It was only in the middle of the eighteenth century that France began to spend large sums mapping and planning its colonial cities.8 The case of Port-au-Prince illustrates this process. In 1749, when the Crown officially designated it as the site for Saint-Domingue’s new colonial capital, Port-au-Prince was a plantation. Religious services were held for a while in the estate’s sugar refinery, while the colony’s governor-general lived in the main plantation house. In November 1751 royal authorities were still granting land and laying out the city when an earthquake struck and destroyed three-quarters of the one hundred houses that had been built there. The city was a cesspool, until 1770, when the residents began filling in the rutted-out and overly wide streets between houses.9 In 1770 another earthquake hit. After this, administrators decreed that all houses were to be built in wood, or masonry between posts, rather than stone, to minimize earthquake damage. A decade later Port-au-Prince had few buildings with a second story. Even in the late 1780s, Moreau de Saint-Méry observed that “nothing about it is reminiscent of a large city.”10 On the north coast, by contrast, Cap Français was a larger, older, and more architecturally sophisticated city than Port-au-Prince, with many two-story stone and masonry buildings. In 1756, however, it had only few of the dance halls, public gardens, fountains, coffee houses, print shops, and bookstores that would later lead travelers to describe it as the Paris of the Antilles. These buildings and public spaces were mostly erected in the 1770s and 1780s. The theater, discussed below, was an exception, having first made its appearance in 1740.11
At midcentury, colonists in Saint-Domingue and Jamaica were already beginning to argue that these places had moved past their buccaneering origins.12 In 1750, for example, Emilien Petit, a judge and planter born in the former pirate town of Léogane, argued that “this country is no longer, as in its origin, inhabited almost entirely by crude, unknown, undistinguished people … seeking refuge in another world from the consequences of their crimes.”13 This conviction that Saint-Domingue had attained a new stage of development grew stronger after the Seven Years’ War, as royal authorities began to increase the size of the colonial bureaucracy, allowed the establishment of a printing office, and established regular transatlantic and intracolonial mail service.14
These post-1763 changes in the colony’s urban culture were so noticeable that in 1769 the planter G. Lerond proposed that Saint-Domingue have its own literary academy. Sophisticated gentlemen, he claimed, had replaced illiterate buccaneers: “All fashions are found in the colony today: plays, concerts, libraries, sumptuous parties where gaiety and wit oppose irksome boredom…. Pirates have given way to dandies with embroidered velvet jackets…. A love of learning accompanies this love of luxury. Those who previously could not read or write are today poets, orators, and scientists.” But an anonymous critic pointed out that the new breed of colonists were obsessed with making money, not polite conversation: “many intelligent people will be found in Saint-Domingue but I repeat that they will justly be too jealous of their time to attend literary conferences.”15
It was in the cities that European visitors were most struck by colonists’ relentless materialism, for they expected that the Church would be at the center of urban life. This was true only in a spatial and legal sense. Saint-Domingue’s towns were built, as in Europe, around parish churches. The Catholic Church was an important part of French colonial ideology, and parishes served as the fundamental unit of local government. As the Code Noir of 1685 proclaimed, all religions besides Catholicism were illegal, though there were a small number of Protestant and Jewish families in the colony. The code specified that all slaves were to be baptized and instructed in the Christian faith. Few planters followed this aspect of the slave law, but the Jesuit order did baptize and catechize slaves.16 The powerful symbolism of the
