Abstract

Historians have long argued that the sugar revolution in the mid-17th Caribbean world gave way to what Marx described as land capitalisation and to the formation of the plantation complex. In the French West Indies, this process gradually turned the revocable concessions of royally-owned lands for their «mise en valeur» into large, unseizable estates belonging to a minority of capitalist planter dynasties. The aim of this article is to show that the de facto appropriation of the colonial spaces as terrae nullius was neither uncontested nor inevitable. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War (1756- 1763), the Chambers of Agriculture of Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe – the expert bodies of the «maîtres éclairés» – criticised the accumulation of overextended possessions and the subsequent increase of wasteland. Stressing the relationship between labour and property as well as the subordination of colonial ownership to the imperatives of political economy, they urged the administration to redistribute the uncultivated parcels in order to boost a class of small-scale white farmers, promote agricultural diversification, and redress the racial imbalance favouring the population of enslaved Africans. The contradictions the Chambers denounced would violently come to the surface at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791.