Caribbean New Orleans
Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society
By Cécile Vidal
552 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 halftones, 7 tables, notes, index
-
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4518-6
Published: June 2019 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-4519-3
Published: April 2019 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5798-9
Published: April 2019
Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Buy this Book
- Hardcover $55.00
- E-Book $29.99
For Professors:
Free E-Exam Copies
Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Awards & distinctions
2020 Research Prize, Société des anglicistes de l'enseignement supérieur / de l'Association Française d'Études Américaines
2020 Lionel-Groulx Prize, Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique française
Drawing on New Orleans’s rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city’s streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana’s capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America’s most intriguing city.
About the Author
Cécile Vidal is professor of history at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
For more information about Cécile Vidal, visit
the
Author
Page.
Reviews
"By stressing the continuum of racial identities and concomitant legal and social expectations tied to race, [Vidal's] argument complicates the historiographic dichotomy of two-tiered racial societies (white over black) versus three-tiered (white, free people of color, enslaved black).”—Choice
“Caribbean New Orleans is unparalleled in the historiography of the Crescent City in terms of its clever draw on archival materials. . . . This skillful exercise was never, to our knowledge, executed before. . . . A thorough study that all New Orleans enthusiasts should read.”—Journal of Early American History
“Wide-ranging and deeply researched…Because Vidal contests prevailing scholarship in such a provocative fashion, her book will no doubt stimulate considerable discussion by historians of slavery for the foreseeable future, and deservedly so.” – William and Mary Quarterly
“An in-depth examination of how race making systematically shaped the history of an early American city. . . . [E]ssential reading for scholars of early New Orleans.” —H-Atlantic
"Interpretively capacious, Caribbean New Orleans brings the history of the city home. By mapping out the deep imbrications between the islands of the Caribbean and the social, cultural, political, and economic life in New Orleans, Vidal deepens our understanding of slavery, race, and urban life in the Atlantic world."--Laurent Dubois, Duke University
"Prodigiously researched and at once nuanced and sweeping, Caribbean New Orleans is a brilliant achievement, reaching far beyond the city at its center to offer a compelling analysis that integrates imperial aspiration with the emergence of social and racial systems in the wider Atlantic world. A true tour de force."--Emily Clark, Tulane University
Quick Links
Related Books
