is an obvious contradiction within colonial inhabitation regarding non-Christians. It is a question of rendering these islands inhabited while recognizing that there are already inhabitants there. Likewise, Pope Alexander VI, while pointing to the existence of “many nations [that] inhabit these countries living in peace,” “gives” and “concedes” these lands, as if they were uninhabited. If Europeans made treaties together and signed their deeds, which created Caribbean operating companies as if these islands were virgin, they nonetheless knew that there were people there. This paradoxical relationship is explicit in the deed that created the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe. The first moment that the other appears is when it is said specifically that this other will be reduced to the same, meaning the other will be stripped of all the qualities that make the other different from a self. It is a matter of rendering these islands inhabited and populated “… for the purpose of instructing the inhabitants of said islands in the Catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion …” The emergence of the other is only a rope with which this other can be drawn back to a known us, towards the same European. The other appears only as matter that can be reduced to another “way of the Self [manière du Moi],” to recall the expression of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.9 This dialectic, through which the other is recognized in that they will no longer be other, is the principal ontological violence of colonial inhabitation that consecrates the impossibility of inhabitation with the other. More than the eclipse of the other that Enrique Dussel has analyzed, colonization denies otherness and constitutes an enterprise of making everything the same, a reduction to the Same, rendering colonial inhabitation an inhabiting-without-the-other.10
Foundations of colonial inhabitation: land grabs, massacres, and land clearing
Inhabiting is not self-evident, hence the explicit precision in the deed creating the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe, where it is a question of “rendering these islands inhabited,” so that it is this doing, in the sense of this acting, that makes inhabitation possible. The acts that colonial man uses to establish his inhabitation constitute the foundations of colonial inhabitation. Three main acts consecrate the principial violence of colonial inhabitation. The first is land grabbing. Colonial inhabitation presupposes the obvious legitimacy of the appropriation of these islands by European colonists and the use of any force necessary to carry out this project. Let us remember that the Amerindians did not have the concept of private ownership of the land.11 This usurpation is accompanied by a set of symbolic gestures directed at the same Europeans. For example, the first act of Christopher Columbus when he arrived in Guanahani in 1492 was to rename the island San Salvador and to become its viceroy and governor. This baptism of the island and his self-declaration as governor were explicitly addressed to the members of his expedition and refer to the collective imaginary of the Spanish Crown. Likewise, in the deed of association for the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe, it is specified that it is a matter of a “faithful association between Us.” When du Plessis and de L’Olive arrived in Martinique with the intention of colonizing it, their first act was to plant the cross symbolizing that this land had been taken.12
The second act founding colonial inhabitation is land clearing. The French “felled” the woods. Far from being merely a circumstance of the French colonization of the Caribbean, cutting down the forests was a condition for inhabiting it. It was necessary to “kill” the woods for colonial inhabitation to be possible, so that these islands can be “inhabited.” Clearing the land was a very difficult task for the first colonists of Saint-Christophe because of their lack of both experience and tools.13 Du Tertre recounts that, when the land was cleared, it released “poisonous vapours” that caused a disease commonly known as coup de barre or sudden fatigue, which contributed to a high mortality rate among enlisted men.14 Myriam Cottias shows that in the Antilles, between 1671 and 1771, recruits had a mortality rate of 25 percent per year.15 Of course, the French colonists were not the only ones to cut down trees. The Amerindians also cut down trees in order to carry out their own agriculture. The difference is that colonization establishes the following relationship: to inhabit is to clear the land, to inhabit is to cut down trees. Colonial inhabitation only begins from the moment that the tree is felled.
Finally, the third act founding colonial inhabitation is the massacre of Amerindians and violence inflicted upon Amerindian women. These massacres were the foundation of colonial inhabitation and were recounted at length by Bartolomé de Las Casas.16 Concerning the French experience in the Caribbean, it was on the ashes of the massacred Caribs that the first French colony in Saint-Christophe was established in 1625 by the first French colonists, under the aegis of d’Esnambuc. The island of Saint-Christophe was occupied by the Caribs, the English, and the French. Pretending that they were avoiding an ambush by the Caribs, who would have tried to drive them out, the English and French, by mutual agreement, decided to massacre all the Caribs of the island and those who would come to it, as Father Du Tertre recounts: “… they stabbed almost all of them in their beds, on the same night, saving only a few of their most beautiful women in order to abuse them and make them their slaves; 100 or 120 of them were killed.”17
This account shows the entanglement of the ideology of colonization with that of male domination, which transcends ethnic boundaries. Colonial inhabitation is explicitly gendered. It is about slaughtering men and raping women, pitting the “savages” against the inhabitants. Colonial inhabitation was established upon the massacre of Amerindians and the possession of the bodies of Amerindian women, a true enactment of the principle of othercide.
Forms of colonial inhabitation: private property, plantations, and slavery
In addition to its principles and its foundations, colonial inhabitation is especially conspicuous in its forms, in its habitat. Here, the meaning of the expression “render these islands inhabited” is to be taken in the sense of manufacturing. Colonial inhabitation is the engineering of humans and ecosystems, and it has three main characteristics. The first feature of colonial inhabitation was the institution of private ownership of the land. Plots of land were allocated to individuals – men – so that they would cultivate them, thereby allowing for export and trade with France. The individual titles of ownership participate fully in the collective enterprise of exploitation by colonial inhabitation. Whether the titles were distributed free of charge, as in the early days of the French occupation of Saint-Christophe, but also in Martinique, or if they were purchased, their validity was conditional upon the clearing and exploitation of the land.18 Several orders made by the Council of Martinique and the king from 1665 to 1743 required owners to clear and cultivate the land.19 With the introduction of private landownership came the parcelling out of land, similar to the “world of fields and fences” established in New England by European colonists.20 Once a common good among the Amerindians, the Caribbean islands were parcelled out, favoring both the settling of colonists and the collective exploitation of the islands by a number of individuals who intensively cultivated their parcels of land until the soil was exhausted before then moving onto another plot. This focus upon parcels prevented a more complete vision of the effects of this intensive cultivation, seen in the deforestation of the plains and mountains of the colony of Santo Domingo.21
Colonial inhabitation’s second main feature was the establishment of the plantation as the primordial form of occupation: an ensemble comprising the cultivated field, the workshops and factory, the master’s house, and the shacks of the enslaved. Whether for cotton, indigo, tobacco, or sugar cane, the plantation was the main form of land occupation. While the principle remains the same, its most characteristic form in the French Caribbean from the second half of the seventeenth century was the sugar-cane plantation. As the parcels of land became larger and larger, land pressures increased more and more, occupying all of the plains of the islands. This arrangement of plantations on the plains of the islands, laid out as early as the seventeenth century, is still visible today. In Martinique, one simply needs to take the road from Fort-de-France to Marin, or from Vauclin to Trinité on the east coast, to realize that all the plains – apart from
