Louisiana and the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

A Crossroads between Europe, Africa, North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America

Workshop organized by Cécile Vidal and Lawrence N. Powell
for Tulane University
and the Centre d'études nord-américaines (EHESS-CNRS)

4-5 April 2008 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

details about the first workshop held in Paris (Nov. 2007)

statement

For a very long time, American and European historians have neglected the history of colonial Louisiana. This began to change beginning in the 1990s, when works on this colony started multiplying. The new interest in Louisiana coincided with the emergence of Atlantic history, a historiographical current that is spurring the decompartmentalization of historical subdisciplines. The colonial history of the New World itself is being reconfigured, raising questions about the national and imperial perspectives that have structured it for too long.

Because of its position at a crossroads, the “Mississippi colony” (as Louisiana was known in France) constitutes a privileged place to follow this trend. Under the French Regime, Louisiana was located at the intersection of two models of French colonization in America: a continental Franco-Indian model and an inland and slave Franco-African model. Louisiana's hybridity thus linked the different societies of the “French Atlantic”. In the same way, during the Spanish period, Louisiana occupied two kinds of peripheral spaces: the Hispano-Indian northern margins of New Spain (California, New Mexico, and Texas) and the littoral and island regions of plantations, with their exploited black slave workforce. Because of its perch on the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana belonged to the cosmopolitan Caribbean world; it, too, participated in those dense relations with the colonies or former colonies of various European powers. At the same time, because it stood at the margin of three rival empires in North America, Louisiana successively came under French, Spanish and British, and then American sovereignty during the eighteenth century and at the outset of the nineteenth century. So, not only, did Louisiana stand at the crossroads of two distinctive economic and commercial systems, but it also refracted the sovereignties of three distinctive European nation-states.

And yet, despite the title of recently published proceedings, these intriguing linkages and comparisons have not been studied to any significant degree. Indeed, the history of colonial and antebellum Louisiana awaits treatment from an Atlantic perspective. The proposed workshop will remedy this oversight by examining the interconnections between Louisiana (both as colony and state) and other regions of the Atlantic world, be they in Europe, Africa or elsewhere in the Americas. The aim is to understand how those dense and still unexplored relationships influenced the formation and evolution of Louisiana society and culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This Atlantic perspective will intensify the now full-blown debate among historians concerning the specificity of social and interethnic relations in Louisiana in comparison with other regions of the New World.

The intent is to hold successive workshops in two locations. The first workshop already occurred in Paris in November 2007. The concluding session is scheduled for New Orleans in April 2008. The Parisian session lasted two days. Papers were circulated in advance so that they could be read prior to the workshop. During the sessions, they were summarized briefly, in order to reserve most of the time for discussions. The same format will be followed in New Orleans: pre-circulation of the papers, brief summary statements delivered at the workshop itself, followed by discussions. The ultimate goal is a collective book to be published in English, the main language of the workshop.

program

Friday, April 4, 2008

09h30 – 10h: Opening: George Bernstein, Tulane University, Sylvia Frey, Tulane University, and Cécile Vidal, CENA, EHESS

10 h – 12 h 30: Chair: Randy Sparks, Tulane University

• Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, Dalhousie University: “‘Un nègre nommè [sic] Lubin ne connaissant pas Sa Nation’: Africans and ‘Africanization’ in Saint Charles Parish, Louisiana, 1780 1812”
• Sophie White, University of Notre Dame: “Cultures of Consumption in French Colonial Louisiana: Slaves' Informal Economies in an Atlantic Context”
• Shannon Lee Dawdy, University of Chicago: “First You Make a Roux with Bear Fat: Cooking, Eating and Colonialism in French Louisiana”

12h 30 – 14 h 30: Luncheon

14 h 30 – 17 h: Chair: Richard Watts, Tulane University

• Guillaume Aubert, Williams College: "'To Establish One Law and Definite Rules': Race, Religion, end the Transatlantic Origins of the Louisiana Code Noir”
• Alexandre Dubé, McGill University: “Making a Career out of the Atlantic: French Louisiana’s Marine Administrators”
• Sylvia L. Hilton, Universidad Complutense, Madrid: “Spanish 'Luisiana' in the Atlantic World (1783-1803): Nexus of Imperial Strategies and International Relations”

Saturday, April 5, 2008

10 h – 12 h 30: Chair: Martha Jones, University of Michigan

• Cécile Vidal, CENA, EHESS: “French Louisiana and Saint-Domingue: ‘The Dependent Servant of an Island Master – in Short the Colony of a Colony’?”
• Mary Williams, Brown University: “Private Lives, Public Order: Marriage, Family and Society in Spanish Colonial Louisiana”
• Emily Clark, Tulane University: “Atlantic Alliances: Marriage among People of African Descent in New Orleans, 1759-1830”

12 h 30 – 14 h 30: Luncheon

14 h 30 – 16 h: Chair: Lawrence N. Powell, Tulane University

• Rebecca Scott, University of Michigan, and Jean Hébrard, EHESS: “Two Households and a Marriage: Color and Class in New Orleans, 1809-1840”
• François Weil, CENA, EHESS: “Louisiana and the Nineteenth-Century French Atlantic”

16 h 30 - 18 h 30: Chair: Cécile Vidal, CENA, EHESS (Session restricted to workshop participants)

• Cécile Vidal: proposition of a text for an introduction