Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue: avec des observations générales sur la population, sur le caractère & les moeurs de ses divers habitans, sur son climat, sa culture, ses productions, son administration (Topographic description, physical, civil, and political history of the French part of the island Santo Domingo: with general observations on the population, on the character and manners of its various inhabitants, its climate, its culture, production, administration)

Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy on 2013-10-10 02:27Z by Steven

Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue: avec des observations générales sur la population, sur le caractère & les moeurs de ses divers habitans, sur son climat, sa culture, ses productions, son administration  (Topographic description, physical, civil, and political history of the French part of the island Santo Domingo: with general observations on the population, on the character and manners of its various inhabitants, its climate, its culture, production, administration.)

Chez l’auteu
1797-1798
2 volumes : 2 ill., maps (engravings) ; 26 cm. (4to)
856 pages

M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry (Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry) (1750-1819)

From The John Carter Brown Library: The mixing of races in Saint Domingue occasioned a plethora of commentaries, mostly venomous and polemical, on the causes and consequences of the colony’s multiracial order. The most famous of these commentaries, though not the most polemical, was by Moreau de Saint-Méry, the colonial jurist and historian whose writings on Saint-Domingue are still a major resource for contemporary scholars. In volume one of his Description, Moreau counted and categorized 11 racial combinations in the colony. He argued that ancestry should be traced back seven generations and hence ultimately comprised 128 combinations. The “science” of skin color received one of its earliest formulations in this work, completed in 1789. Moreau was himself the father of a mixed-race child by his mulatto mistress.

Read the entire book here.

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