06/07/2022
Congratulations to Jennifer L. Palmer, recipient of the 2021 Histoire sociale / Social History Best Article prize, for her article “‘She persisted in her Revolt’: Between Slavery and Freedom in Saint-Domingue,” 53, no. 107 (2020).
The article will be freely available on Project MUSE for the duration of the year.
Find it here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/757131
The citation from the Prize committee:
Jennifer L. Palmer, “‘She persisted in her revolt’: Between Slavery and Freedom in Saint-Domingue,” Histoire sociale / Social History 53, no. 107 (2020): 17-41.
"In her admirably crafted study, Jennifer L. Palmer encourages us to think anew about law and social relations in the French plantation colony of Saint-Domingue. At its heart lies the story of one Marie Victoire Morisseau, a woman of colour who fled three times between 1770 and 1772 in an effort to secure her freedom. Yet, this was no ordinary case of a runaway slave. Marie Victoire claimed to be free and local officials even validated this claim in 1774. Ultimately, however, colonial officials rejected this assertion and returned Marie Victoire to her White planter father. Drawing on a careful analysis of a rich array of colonial and French sources, Palmer tellingly positions the legal wrangling over Marie Victoire at the centre of a major shift in colonial administration: the triumph of “documentary” over “social” definitions of freedom. That is, whereas in the earlier decades of the eighteenth century, it was possible for slaves to establish their free status on the basis of their social ties to White society, by mid-century the French state increasingly required valid documentation of free status, for example an appropriate mention in a baptismal record or contract. Marie Victoire’s claims are finally dismissed because while she was assumed to be free, this status lacked documentary confirmation.
To reach this conclusion, itself an important indication of how the French regime in Paris and Versailles strove to impose order on colonial societies, Palmer brilliantly explores the complexities of this latter world, which made the very concept of “socially” established free status possible. The lives of Whites and persons of colour, she reveals, were closely intertwined. Informal unions between White men and women of colour were frequent and even accepted. Marie Victoire’s father, François Morisseau, was unusual in that he formally recognized his children born out of wedlock and even had them baptized. More typically, Palmer stresses, Morisseau had a habit of freeing female slaves to reward them for their valued services to the household, and not merely as mistresses. Herein lay the root not just of Marie Victoire’s problems but also those of many women of colour: such manumissions were only rarely formally documented. Striking a fine balance between nuanced analysis and argumentative clarity, Palmer’s article is also wonderfully humane. She affords the reader glimpses into the lives and emotions of planters and slaves, colonial officials and freed men and women of colour. And far from being a “simple” victim of the slave system, Marie Victoire emerges as an intelligent, resourceful woman with a key understanding of legal practices and bureaucratic procedures. This is, in short, an exemplary piece of historical scholarship that offers a host of new insights into questions of slavery and freedom, colonial regimes, gender and social organization in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world."
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