What would it take to bring enlightened reform to colonial Caribbean sugar plantations, an environment nearly antithetical to enlightenment? This is one of the questions investigated by David Allen Harvey in his book Tropical Despotisms: Enlightened Reform in the French Caribbean. Harvey dives into a fleeting but important period in France’s colonial empire. The Caribbean’s profits were crucial to France’s economy, but the recent loss to Britain in the Seven Years’ War signaled that, without significant reform, the empire might not last. Harvey highlights the efforts to revive the empire through a reform of colonial institutions that would spread the ideals of the Enlightenment. For economic historians, his work provides interesting insights into colonial institutions.

The book’s title, Tropical Despotisms, invokes Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment thinker who wrote on the distinction between monarchy and despotism. Monarchies operate under laws and institutions that limit the ruler’s power, a concept we now refer to as checks and balances. But despotisms have no such constraints. They govern according to the tyrant’s arbitrary will. The Caribbean corner of France’s empire, according to contemporary Enlightenment thinkers, was a mille-feuille of despotism. Despotism was the foundation of not just the civic governance but also the governance of their plantations. Harvey’s book focuses on the small group of reformers who wanted to bring enlightenment principles to the Caribbean and lift the territories out of despotism. While the motivation for such change was founded in some moral reasoning, they also saw the inherent fragility of an empire centered on extracting rent from enslaved labor. Thus, they hoped both reforms would make the colonies more humane while increasing their stability and, ultimately, their profitability.

Harvey reviews four main areas where enlightened reformers tangled with despotism. First, there was the issue of trade (Chapter 2), where the despotism of mercantilism limited the colonies’ economies. He agrees with the conventional view that the Seven Years’ War spurred a shift towards free trade. But he deepens our understanding of the trade policy debate by emphasizing the work of enlightened reformers such as Mercier de La Rivière, Guillaume de Bellecombe, and Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, whose experiences in colonial administration helped them see the damage that mercantilism did to the colonies’ prosperity.

Next, Harvey examines the despotism of colonial governance and the colonists’ tax and military obligations to the metropole (Chapter 3). Reformers drew on Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu in particular, to argue that the colonies’ political and economic potential was limited by the metropole’s reluctance to release its despotic control and grant them greater autonomy and self-governance.

The third issue of despotism covers the definition of race (Chapter 4) and its effect on social order (Chapter 5). Society accepted that conditions in the Caribbean (such as the unbalanced sex ratios and the effect of climate on sexuality) would lead to more interracial relationships. This led to debates and policies meant to control the effects of such relationships on the empire’s stability.

Finally, there was the micro-level despotism of labor relations (Chapter 6) and enforcement (Chapter 7). The plantation economy generated fortunes for the metropole but created its profits from individual despots extracting rents from enslaved labor. The reformers advanced ideas for new labor relations that would form a middle ground between slavery and free labor. The proposals still favored coercion, just without the unsightly parts, as if that separation were possible. While true reform was stifled, the enlightened reformers helped shape the plantation ordinance of 1784, which strengthened the legal rights of the enslaved. But when the ordinance was challenged, as in the Lejeune affair, it became evident that enlightenment ideals would not bear fruit if the law was only a piece of paper.

For economic historians, the brightest gems will be the details on institutional reform and their failures. One theme of institutional change that emerges is that, regardless of the enlightened reformers’ position, policy typically broke in favor of the colonial planters. The issues did not fall on a line where reformers took one side and planters took the other. In some cases, the two were aligned. For example, reformers followed enlightened principles and pushed for free trade. Planters agreed with this position. Despite the metropole’s formal restrictions, the colonies gained de facto free trade through smuggling or outright ignoring the restrictions. On other issues, the reformers and planters were on opposite sides. The enlightened reformers saw slavery as the major fault line in the colonial system, the surest source to quake the empire. But they failed to make any significant change to labor institutions. The planters won again. This leads to the conclusion that the most powerful force in determining colonial institutions is the people closest to the action. Sometimes we frame colonial institutions as the empire’s attempt to extract as much rent as possible from the colony. But the planters’ interests superseded the empire’s. Colonial institutions might be more accurately labeled colonists’ institutions.

Harvey’s book is an interesting look at a crucial period in the history of the French empire. But it is also a new perspective on an issue that economic historians value. For some, Harvey’s work will challenge their understanding of colonial institutions and how they were formed. Others may find that the debates and events discussed in the book inspire new avenues for research. It will appeal most to scholars of the period, but those interested in new institutional economics may find something interesting in it.