RACE AND DEVELOPMENT IN LOUISIANA

In Louisiana, race and economics have always been intricately intertwined. Struggling to occupy and profit from its vast territory along the Mississippi, the French Crown in 1717 granted a monopoly called the Company of the West to a Scot named John Law. His company parceled out land along the river and financial support to those who would develop tobacco and rice farms there. Two years later the first major shipment of enslaved Africans arrived, and over the next decade their population grew sevenfold, going from half the population of white Europeans to over twice their numbers.

Where slaves outnumbered owners by a large margin, repression was intense. Slaves were brutally treated upon their capture, in transit, and upon their arrival in Louisiana, many dying each year from maltreatment and disease. Slave ship captains sailed with orders to bring rice from Africa and slaves with experience in growing it and the dye plant indigo. For these reasons slaves from the Senegambia region of West Africa were prized in Louisiana.

After France ceded control of Louisiana to Spain in 1763, the Spaniards poured energy and resources into its new colony. In the next quarter century, the numbers of slaves grew fourfold. This was the period in which the Acadians (later dubbed the derogatory “Cajun”), French speakers who had been exiled from Canada, began to arrive. During this time, Spain and France went to war, and revolution swept over the British colonies nearby and, more importantly for Louisiana, over France.