Finola O’Kane
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Comparing imperial design strategies
The Franco-Irish plantations of Saint-Domingue
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French advances in engineering, map-making, landscape design and colonial governance made Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, the world’s most valuable tropical colony for most of the eighteenth century. Governed from Paris as another French département, its many plantations, their success founded on matrilineal chattel slavery, proliferated across the region’s flat plains. The infrastructure that supported their extraordinary productivity was designed and drawn from a distance and, exhibiting the French State’s ambitious design coherence, this led to remarkable innovations in irrigation, water power and landscape planning. In contrast, Jamaica’s designed landscapes speak of the reach of the individual planter, the power of the Jamaican Assembly, and both empires’ diverging traditions of cartography, engineering and landscape design.

The Saint-Domingue plantation-owner Moreau de Saint-Méry’s encyclopedic two-volume Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle de Saint-Domingue (1797–8) was intended to provide an in-depth description and assessment of every quarter of Saint-Domingue. Saint-Méry’s volumes, when cross-referenced with Saint-Domingue’s digitised cadastral maps, and some other significant visitors’ accounts, reveal the role of Franco-Irish families, such as the dynasties of Butler, O’Sheil/Sheill, McNemara and O’Rourke, in creating them. Enabling a comparative analysis of the French and English Caribbean, and particularly the French and English plantation, the method also reveals how and why the landscape design of Saint-Domingue became the runaway design model for eighteenth-century colonial space.

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Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean

Interdisciplinary perspectives

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