Ancient to Modern Europe
Pierre Force has created a remarkable work in his account of multi-generational families from Lower Navarre and their migrations across the Atlantic. The book is a tourde-force of archives from the period, and it astounds the reader many times with the details he uncovered from scouring the records. The details in this micro-history enrich our understanding of how migration, property rights, and institutions functioned in the eighteenth-century colonial Saint Domingue.
Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the migration networks that facilitated leaving Lower Navarre and arriving in Saint Domingue. In the eighteenth century, these networks were inseparable from property rights. An individual’s claim on property was determined at birth, with the eldest becoming the heir of the entire estate. But the house still provided for the younger children, and one option was to finance the children’s emigration. Migrating to Saint Domingue was relatively cheap, and because the colony’s economy was growing the child could capture higher returns than other options such as becoming a government employee.
In fact, the returns to migrating to Saint Domingue began to grow so much that even the eldest children began to migrate. In Chapter 3, Force looks at the puzzling case of an eldest son who chose to leave his house and join his uncle in Saint Domingue. His migration required a complicated set of property rights adjudication, and his absence led to a decrease in the house’s assets. Although emigrating cost his house a significant share of its property (not as much in direct costs as from deterioration), the returns to migrating were large enough to motivate his trip. In the eighteenth century, coffee came to Saint Domingue and became a profitable crop for little start-up costs. This son acquired property and added to the family’s assets.
Although much of the book focuses on the migration networks, Force makes his biggest contribution to economic history in his Chapter 4 discussion of the Haitian Revolution. Force reinforces the political motivations for the revolution, covered thoroughly by Laurent Dubois (Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Harvard University Press, 2004), but then uses the micro-history to show how property rights transcended racial alliances. Jean-Pierre Lamerenx, a white plantation owner and member of one of the families Force tracks, commanded a small militia group against slave insurgents in 1791 (p. 90). Yet by 1794, after emancipation in the colony, Lamerenx was serving as Toussaint Louverture’s aide-de-camp (pp. 105–106). Lamerenx did not fight for the rights of his black general and soldiers; he was trying to regain his property and saw Louverture as the surest bet. Indeed, Louverture disciplined the early insurgents, prevented them from destroying property, and then, once he gained control, invited white plantation owners to return to their land (p. 107). Beyond highlighting the role of property rights in the revolution, the property data cited in this chapter should get economic historians excited for future research.
Micro-histories thrive in their capacity to highlight how institutions worked on the ground. Sometimes economists ignore the nuance of institutional details or make bad assumptions on what institutions existed, and micro-histories can correct those misperceptions. It is interesting to read in one place about how “emigrants were willing to overlook the island’s harsh climate and high mortality” (p. 61)—for example, women writing their friends about which of their friends died from tropical illnesses (p. 56)—and then in another place to see Force argue that Saint Domingue had significantly more inclusive and secure property rights than the migrants’ origin (p. 41). The Saint Domingue real-estate market was liquid, and as a consequence, “land surveying was much more active in Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century than in continental France.” It seems high mortality rates did not stop the colonists from importing the same, or better, institutions they had in France.
Perhaps the book’s largest fault is the failure to engage with a broader literature than just the research directly related to the time period and regions discussed. This weakness is most obvious in the discussion on the relationship between slavery and profitability (pp. 55–59). The main views cited on the topic come from Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say, reasonable sources because of their contemporary observations and hypotheses. But the discussion stops with them, ignoring the mountains of research established since then. Strangely, the book does not even cite any of the major works in the recent History of Capitalism literature, where the question of slavery’s role in economic development looms large, even if the conclusions are debated. This topic is current and relevant, and therefore the book’s treatment leaves the reader wanting.
Another sign of its narrow focus is that readers might not understand some sections without prior knowledge on the topic. An example of where the absence of prior knowledge affects understanding comes in Chapter 4. One section concludes describing how in 1801 Toussaint Louverture’s economic plan was moving forward as expected, “plantations in the hands of their original [white] owners” (p. 110). Then the next section begins with a paragraph that dives into a discussion on how the 1805 constitution banned foreigners from owning property and stripped property from anyone who had left the island. The transition might confuse readers who do not know that Louverture died in 1802 and his replacement, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, distrusted the French and massacred whites on multiple occasions (Dubois 2004, pp. 270–271, 300). Omitting these details keeps the book’s text brief at 160 pages, but it also restricts the audience to specialists in the field.
Wealth and Disaster represents an impressive amount of detailed work. Force’s study will be invaluable to researchers examining the causes of migration from the Old World to the New. Yet its relentless focus on the regions and periods discussed make it more suitable for those interested specifically in these topics than for a broader audience.
