The Colony and the Company: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble

""Rather than beginning with the Haitian Revolution or the late 18th century, Ghachem re-centres Saint-Domingue's transformation into a violent sugar-plantation society in the early 18th century, connecting that transformation to France's Mississippi Bubble and the collapse of company monopolies in the Atlantic world. In doing so, the book shifts both the chronology and the explanatory framework commonly used in Haitian historiography.""

""\"The Colony and the Company\" by Ghachem is an excellently written historical exploration of an often-overlooked contributing factor of the Haitian Revolution. The author positions metropolitan finance and company collapse as complementary to, rather than a replacement for, revolutionary interpretations by looking closely at the connection of France's Mississippi Bubble and the economic landscape in Saint Domingue, thus expanding the reader's understanding of the events leading up to 1791.""

Saint-Domingue's transformation into a violent sugar-plantation society took root in the early 18th century rather than the late 18th century. Metropolitan finance and the collapse of company monopolies, centered on France's Mississippi Bubble (c. 1719–1720), reshaped imperial priorities and implanted enduring structures of debt, monopoly, coercion, and plantation violence. These fiscal and commercial disruptions altered the colony's economic landscape well before 1791. Metropolitan financial crises complemented revolutionary explanations by revealing long-term institutional origins of coercion and economic dependency that conditioned later upheaval in the colony.

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