There is no shortage of works on Atlantic empires, economies, or revolutions, and yet Manuel Covo's Entrepôt of Revolutions reframes how we think about all of these things. Covo's analysis of colonial capitalism centers not on the British and Spanish slave labor camps and mines, or genocide campaigns on the American continents that often star in stories of imperial development, but on Saint-Domingue. Covo showcases the “pearl of the Antilles” as the “hub of global capitalism” (2). The free-trade debates of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions centered on this incredibly rich island—the most profitable colony in the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century.
This is not, however, a book about only economic debates in the abstract, but one on the complicated realities and shifting networks that defined the era of imperial overthrow in the Americas. Covo mines a wealth of trade records, legislative documents, merchant papers, diplomatic correspondence, and pamphlets in multiple languages to spotlight the diverse cast of individuals, from enslaved laborers to well-known philosophers, who made Saint Domingue the “counterintuitive pinnacle of a republican project based on international law and commercial diplomacy” (97). Because France, like Spain, was a “polycentric polity,” there were multiple centers of power; the book highlights in new ways the importance of Saint Domingue as one of these centers (8).
After an introduction that explains the stakes in “placing political economy at the center of the revolutionary narrative” and shifting the conversation away from a Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Revolutions and free trade debates, Covo moves from 1776 to 1801 to highlight the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. In nine chapters, he painstakingly reconstructs the mercantile relationships, diplomatic networks, and political ideas that flowed through Saint-Domingue (8). Each chapter highlights the shifting attitudes and actions of individuals who were not bound by the “binary politics” (189) that seemed to define revolutionary sentiment and alliance in this era. An epilogue looks ahead to Haitian independence and the reversal of French republican values. The primacy given to economic factors and individuals’ profit motives throughout the book is tempered by the fact that “the debate over free trade could not be disentangled from Saint-Domingue's racial context” (116).
The fifth chapter, “The Best of a Bad Bargain,” is especially illustrative of Covo's ability to analyze transnational trade in fresh ways. The chapter, its title taken from a merchant's letter describing his proposed reaction to the 1791 insurrection, argues that “trading practices on the ground reshaped the French-American alliance more significantly than the lawmaking of the National Assembly in Paris” (117). After the flour markets were opened to non-French traders, policymakers continued to debate the status of the exclusif amid the ongoing crises of the French Revolution, and slave revolts sometimes prompted colonial officials to lift monopolies. A focus on just these debates, however, would obscure the realities of enslaved persons’ struggles to destroy the plantation economy. Here, Covo gives a nod to Johnhenry Gonzalez's colonial luddism in Maroon Nation (2019), documenting merchants’ attempts to profit through various legal and illegal channels, such as military provisioning and slave trade; none of these efforts had clear or singular ideological intents.
For example, Covo retells the battle of Cap-Français, which ultimately resulted in the abolition of slavery, through the lens of commercial motives. Deals worked out by US and French traders have been portrayed as evidence of the French-American alliance and a shared commercial republicanism. The reality, Covo tells us, was pettier and more self-interested. Disagreements led to a situation in which French traders refused to pay. When American merchants demanded justice, the French traders switched allegiances, and when rebels burned the port, these French traders didn't have to pay the prices they had opposed. Although the fire destroyed American goods, US merchants, for their part, benefited when Black revolutionaries took over and were happy to do business with them.
Although American and French traders usually acted in their own self-interest, we get glimpses of some ideological motives. Covo mentions that merchants usually avoided political debates, with occasional exceptions. He uses the Girard brothers as an example. Jean Girard expressed strong white supremacist views along with his hope that the English would seize control, while Stephen remained loyal to France and sided with Toussaint L'Ouverture when L'Ouverture's allegiance shifted to a seemingly pro-emancipation France. It would have been helpful if Covo had given us more evidence from their correspondence, which he says demonstrated “immense freedom of tone, blending commercial language with intimate and political reflections” (122). He might have also explained more thoroughly the economic and ideological rationale behind their views.
Following the burning of Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue merchants and planters sought refuge in the United States and subsequently changed the economic landscape of US-French trade, seeking new entrepreneurial activities and investing in US land. American merchants, likewise, took advantage of the destruction of Cap-Français and the abolition of slavery to triple the size of the slave trade to Havana and to increase the value of US exports to the French West Indies. The intricacies and changing dynamics of new iterations of the “triangular trade,” which Covo details, are too numerous to mention but will be important for any scholar or student interested in the “rapidly globalizing economy” of the late eighteenth century (2). This book is “connected history” at its finest (11).
