Fugitives
From the Enslaved to the Carceral in Nineteenth-Century French Guiana
In: Journal of Global SlaverySearch for other papers by Lorraine M. Paterson in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
Historically, French Guiana was an anomaly in the French Americas, neither a settler colony nor an economically successful slave-based plantation colony like its wealthy Antillean counterparts. Sporadically governed, underpopulated, and generally neglected by the metropole, it was considered a backwater of the French empire. However, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, the punishment of fugitive slaves had become fundamental to how the colony of French Guiana conceptualized itself. The struggle between owner and state about who had the right to punish, and by what means, caused ferocious repercussions over who could claim sovereignty over slaves and their potential labor. The issue of flight came to signify the legal and political battle between settlers and the state. Indeed, the desire of the French state to control the terrain of French Guiana through the recapture—and punishment—of the enslaved echoes what would occur in the latter half of the nineteenth century as French Guiana became the world’s most notorious penal colony. This paper will explore these issues in nineteenth-century French Guiana through the fugitive figure of the enslaved and subsequently that of the runaway convict.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Aldrich, Robert. The French Presence in the South Pacific, 1842–1940 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990).
-
Donet-Vincent, Danielle. “De l’ esclavage et du bagne en Guyane Française.” Revue d’ histoire du XIXe siècle 18 (1) (1999), 83–93.
-
Flory, Céline, “Sierra Leone Indentured Workers in Guyana and Martinique in the Nineteenth Century.” In Slavery, Abolition and the Transition to Colonialism in Sierra Leone, eds. Paul E. Lovejoy and Suzanne Schwarz (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2016), 257–272.
-
Forster, Colin. “Unwilling Migrants from Britain and France.” In Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Etlis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 259–291.
-
Forster, Colin. France and Botany Bay: The Lure of a Penal Colony (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996).
-
Fouck, Serge Mam Lam Fouck. La Guyane Française au temps de l’ esclavage, de l’ or et de la francisation (1802–1946) (Cayenne: Ibis Rouge Editions, 2015).
-
Godfroy, Marion. Kourou and the Struggle for a French America. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
-
Hodgson, Kate. “French Atlantic Appropriations: Montlinot, Eighteenth-Century Colonial Slavery, and Penal and Forced Labour Schemes Between Europe, Africa and the Americas.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 50 (2) (2015), 116–132.
-
Jennings, Evelyn P. “The Sinews of Spain’s American Empire: Forced Labor in Cuba from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries.” In Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, 1500–1914, eds. John Donoghue and Evelyn P. Jennings (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 25–53.
-
Krakovitch, Odile. Les Femmes Bagnards, (Paris: Perrin, 1998).
-
Lowenthal, David. “Colonial Experiments in French Guiana, 1760–1800.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 32 (1) (1952), 22–43.
-
Mam Lam Fouck, Serge. L’ Esclavage en Guyane Française entre l’ occultation et la revendication: l’ evolution de la representation de l’ esclavage dans la société guyanaise (1848–1977) (Fort de France: Ibis Rouge, 1986).
-
Merle, Isabelle. Experiences Coloniales: La Nouvelle Caledonie (1895–1920). (Paris: Belin, 1995).
-
Michel, Aurélia. Un monde en nègre et blanc: enquête historique sue l’ order racial. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2020).
-
Michelot, Jean Claude. La Guillotine sèche: histoire des bagnes de Guyane, (Paris: Fayard, 1981).
-
Pierre, Michel. Le Terre de la grande punition: Cayenne 1852–1953. (Paris: Autrement, 2001).
-
Redfield, Peter. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: U.C. Press, 2000).
-
Sanchez, Jean-Lucien. “The French Empire, 1542–1976.” In A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, ed. Clare Anderson. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 123–156.
-
Schloss, Rebecca Hartkopf. “Imagining the “grand colonial family” in French Guiana, 1819–1823.” Atlantic Studies 11 (2) (2014), 195–217.
-
Shineberg, Dorothy and Jean-Marie Kohler, “Church and Commerce in New Caledonia: Ballande and the Bishops, 1885–1935.” Journal of Pacific History 25 (1) (1990), 3–21.
-
Spieler, Miranda. “Slave Flight, Slave Torture, and the State: Nineteenth-Century French Guiana.” French Politics, Culture and Society 33 (1) (2015), 55–74.
-
Spieler, Miranda. Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
-
Traver, Barbara. “A New Kourou: Projects to Settle the Maroons of Suriname in French Guiana” Journal of the Western Society for French History 29 (2011), 107–121.
-
Yarrington, Jonna. “Producing the Periphery.” In Locating Guyane, eds. Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2018), 91–104.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 441 | 173 | 15 |
| Full Text Views | 27 | 5 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 90 | 11 | 0 |
Fugitives
From the Enslaved to the Carceral in Nineteenth-Century French Guiana
In: Journal of Global SlaverySearch for other papers by Lorraine M. Paterson in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
Historically, French Guiana was an anomaly in the French Americas, neither a settler colony nor an economically successful slave-based plantation colony like its wealthy Antillean counterparts. Sporadically governed, underpopulated, and generally neglected by the metropole, it was considered a backwater of the French empire. However, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, the punishment of fugitive slaves had become fundamental to how the colony of French Guiana conceptualized itself. The struggle between owner and state about who had the right to punish, and by what means, caused ferocious repercussions over who could claim sovereignty over slaves and their potential labor. The issue of flight came to signify the legal and political battle between settlers and the state. Indeed, the desire of the French state to control the terrain of French Guiana through the recapture—and punishment—of the enslaved echoes what would occur in the latter half of the nineteenth century as French Guiana became the world’s most notorious penal colony. This paper will explore these issues in nineteenth-century French Guiana through the fugitive figure of the enslaved and subsequently that of the runaway convict.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 441 | 173 | 15 |
| Full Text Views | 27 | 5 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 90 | 11 | 0 |
