BIBFRAME Work

Title

The colony and the company

Type

• Monograph
• Text

Contribution

• Ghachem, Malick W. (Malick Walid) (author)

Subject

• Haïti--Conditions économiques--18e siècle (RVM)
• Haïti--Histoire--Jusqu'à 1791 (RVM)
• Haiti--History--To 1791 (LCSH)
• Compagnie des Indes (LCNAF)
• Mississippi Bubble, France, 1720 (LCSH)
• 1700-1799 (FAST)
• Haiti--Economic conditions--18th century (LCSH)

Language

• English

Illustrative Content

• maps
• illustrations

Classification

• DDC: 972.9403
• LCC: F1923 .G43 2025 (Assigner: dlc) (Status: used by assigner)

Content

• still image
• text
• cartographic image

Supplementary content

• bibliography
• index

Summary

"In the early eighteenth century, France turned to its New World colonies to help rescue the monarchy from the wartime debts of Louis XIV. This short-lived scheme ended in the first global stock market crash, known as the Mississippi Bubble. Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was indelibly marked by the crisis, given its centrality in the slave-trading monopoly controlled by the French East Indies Company. Rising prices for enslaved people and devaluation of the Spanish silver supply triggered a diffuse rebellion that broke the company's monopoly and paved the way for what planters conceived as 'free trade.' In The Colony and the Company, Malick Ghachem describes how the crisis that began in financial centers abroad reverberated throughout Haiti. Beginning on the margins of white society before spreading to wealthy planters, the revolt also created political openings for Jesuit missionaries and people of color. The resulting sugar revolution, Ghachem argues, gave rise to an increasingly violent, militarized planter state from which the colony, and later Haiti, would never recover. Ghachem shows that the wealthy planters who co-opted the rebellion were simultaneously locked in a showdown with maroon resistance. The conflict between the planters' militant defense of their prerogatives and maroon rebellion laid the foundations for a brutal history of marginalization and immiseration. Haiti became a full-fledged plantation colony held together by a ruthless form of white supremacy and enslavement, triggering a cycle of escalating violence that led to the Haitian Revolution. Tragically, Haiti's postrevolutionary future remained captive to the imperial sway of money and debt"-- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Company colony -- Colonial system -- "Women, negroes, and unknown, unimportant people" -- Militant slavery -- The company of Jesus -- Maroons and the military-planter state.

Authorized Access Point

Ghachem, Malick W. (Malick Walid). The colony and the company

Geographic Coverage

• Haiti

Admin Metadata

• Date: 2026-09-11T20:21:30.403883+00:00
• Agent: cbc
• Status: c
• Derived from: 24096742

Admin Metadata

• Date: 2026-09-11
• Cataloger id: Unknown
• Description level: http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/bibframe-2-6-0/
• Description language: eng
• Description authentication: pcc