home to various households. The privatization of the land and the introduction of plantations was not only a way of occupying these arable lands. The establishment of these plantations as a principle for inhabiting the islands also structured how the rest of the territory would be occupied. The location of ports, the creation of roads and railways, and the construction of parishes were conceived within the framework of this colonial inhabitation. The religious, political, and administrative organization of the territory was designed to turn these islands into lands of intensive monocultures, whose products would be exclusively exported to France.
Finally, the third fundamental feature of this colonial inhabiting was the mass exploitation of human beings via a hierarchical organization of production that featured a master and servants. Regardless of their origins or skin color, this exploitation of human beings was a condition of colonial inhabiting. We can see this intertwining of colonial inhabitation and human exploitation in the official vocabulary of French royal and colonial authorities, where the word “inhabitant” is confused with “master.” One example can be seen in the edict of the intendant of Martinique of January 7th, 1734, which “forbids the masters to have their coffee sold by their Negroes,” and where article 1 specifies that “the inhabitants who have their coffee transported by their slaves, outside of their residence [habitation], give them a note signed by them ….”22 The inhabitant is the master, the master is the inhabitant. The enslaved are the Negroes, those who do not inhabit.
As an inextricable condition of colonial inhabitation, the exploitation of human beings gave rise to various forms of colonial servitude and slavery. Here the epithet “colonial” is not a historical indicator but reflects the fact that this domination of human beings is carried out in order to continue colonial inhabitation. This was first the case with the enslavement of the Amerindians, which was particularly intense in the Spanish experience in Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. In the French experience, this colonial slavery was, in the early days, marked by recourse to White indentured servants. These people were enlisted to work for thirty-six months and received a salary that was paid at the end of this period. The domination of these people, whose social conditions did not allow them to pay for the crossing, had already begun upon their departure from the French ports. In addition to the promises of riches to be found on the islands, some were even “rounded up.”23 Others, often prisoners in the jails of Nantes castle and the Bastille, were literally deported, including women.24 In the Antilles, the working conditions of these “early fellers [défricheurs]” were harsh.25 The inhabitant, on whose behalf the indentured servant was working, could “transfer” the rights he had over that servant to another inhabitant, giving rise to a trade.26 The development of sugar plantations, as well as the slave trade in the second half of the seventeenth century, prefigured the end of French indentured servitude. For the masters, it was more “profitable” to invest in a lifelong labor force [main-d’œuvre], the enslaved, and so the treatment of indentured servants became all the more harsh as the masters wished to limit future competition.27 The government tried unsuccessfully to preserve the use of indentured servants by requiring that ships departing from French ports have a certain number of indentured workers aboard.28
This mass exploitation of human beings found its fullest expression in the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Black Africans in the Americas. Acknowledging without ambiguity the insertion of this history into a global history of humanity and the various kinds of servile relationships found there, it is important not to bury the specificities of these Caribbean enslavements to avoid offending certain political inclinations.29 The main difference in comparison with other slave trades is not only down to its intensity over a few centuries, its transoceanic distances, or its dehumanizations. The difference lies in its colonial character. Colonial inhabitation was the purpose of this slavery. Finally, the exploitation of human beings continued after the abolition of slavery through various forms of forced labor, including indentured servitude. The political history of the former French colonies of the Caribbean is a history of the maintenance of colonial inhabitation and its plantations and the recourse to different workforces.30
With its principles, its foundations, and its forms, colonial inhabitation joins together the political and ecological processes of European colonization. The enslavement of men and women, the exploitation of nature, the conquests of lands and indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and the deforestations, the exploitation of mineral and soil resources, on the other, are not two different realities but are elements of the same colonial project. The European colonization of the Americas is just another name for the imposition of a singular, violent, and destructive way of inhabiting the Earth.
| Principles | Foundations | Forms | |
| Relationships to the land | Geographical and ontological dependence | Land grabbing | Private ownership of the land |
| Relationships to non-humans | Exploitation of non-humans | Land clearing/deforestation | Plantations |
| Relationships to other humans | Othercide | Massacre of the Amerindians and domination of women | Servitude and enslavement |
Characteristics of colonial inhabitation
Since 1492, this colonial inhabitation of the Earth has spread, on a global scale, its plantations and factories, its geographical and ontological dependencies between cities and countryside, between countries of the North and those of the South, as well as its misogynistic enslavements. Parallel to the standardization of the Earth into monocultures, this colonial inhabitation erases the other, the one who is different and who inhabits otherwise. Colonial inhabitation creates an Earth without a world, leaving open the question posed by the poet-singer Gil Scott-Heron in “Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?”: “What about the Red man/Who met you at the coast?”31
Notes
1 1 Dominique Rogers and Boris Lesueur (eds), Sortir de l’esclavage: Europe du Sud et Amériques, XIVe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Karthala, 2018); Myriam Cottias, Elisabeth Cunin, and Antonio Almeida Mendes, Les Traites et les esclavages: perspectives historiques et contemporaines (Paris: Karthala, 2010).
2 2 Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 26–146.
3 3 Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (Paris: Éditions Thomas Lolly, 1667), vol. 1, pp. 8–9. I have modified the language here.
4 4 Jean-Baptiste Thibault de Chanvalon, “Moments perdus ou sottisier,” in Voyage à la Martinique, 1751–1756: contenant diverses observations sur la physique, l’histoire naturelle, l’agriculture, les mœurs et les usages de cette isle faites en 1751 et dans les années suivantes, ed. Monique Pouliquen (Paris: Karthala, 2004), p. 261.
5 5 Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperPerennial, 2001), pp. 145–7.
6 6 Cardinal Armand Richelieu, “Commission aux Sieurs d’Esnambuc et du Roissey, capitaines du Roi
