Crypto-Race Relations Books
I kept borrowing Ned Sublette's The World that Made New Orleans before trips to that city, but never got around to reading it until I bought it. I was looking for a good travel book, something that would give context to the city, like Elizabeth Nash's book about Madrid. Instead, it was more like Richard Fletcher's Moorish Spain, an in-depth look at the defining historical moment of the city/region's development.
Which meant it was about 40% colonial history of North America and 40% race history and relations. As the toehold of France and Spain into British North America and the gateway between South America's mining, the Caribbean's sugar plantations, and the farmers of the new United States, there's a lot of history. Our visit to the site of the Battle of New Orleans made me realize there was more to the story than what I'd learned in school; The World that Made New Orleans made me realize there's a lot more, that the first half of the nineteenth century was a lot more complicated than the run-up to the Civil War, which is how I learned it in my 3 years in a row of American History.
The history of slavery in the United States was also far more brutal and disgusting than I could've imagined. Sublette's book talks about all the things you can't discuss with high school students, about the motivations and unexpected outcomes of banning importation of slaves in America (it's not philanthropy, it's protectionism) and the economics. The museum in the Cabildo shows how sugar is a much more capital-intensive crop than cotton; Sublette talks about how slaves worked double shifts during harvest and processing because otherwise their down-time maintenance costs would be prohibitive.
Sublette "goes there" and talks about how the best investment a young man could make is to buy a fertile but unpretty young slave, breed her, and sell her children, thus reaping the products of her labor and getting the dividend of children. Moreover, by owning a slave, he gets to call himself a slaveowner and hobnob with the right sort. Sublette asks the reader to consider the psychology of a small child growing up with playmates that he will someday own and use, possibly even sexually.
You can't talk about the history of Louisiana or slavery in the US without mentioning Thomas Jefferson and Sublette hates him more than Brookhiser. For good reason. He quotes from Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia about the differences in the races and Jefferson's prediction that "the real distinctions which nature has made...will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race." Fucking his wife's half-sister was just the tip of the iceberg compared to collaborating with the French Revolution and giving Napoleon carte blanche with regards to Toussaint L'ouverture.
Similarly, The Black Count was supposed to be a book about derring-do and ended up being about race relations in revolutionary and Napoleonic France. The back of the book describes how Alexander Dumas books were all about his stranger-than-fiction father, the bastard child of a French aristocrat on the run and a Haitian woman, who became a general in France's revolutionary army. The first chapter or two makes it clear that Dumas hero-worshipped his father and that in many ways, his popular adventure books were his Mary Sue-ing his father's life. I would've preferred a closer comparison of the literary works to the real-life events that inspired them and more of a discussion of how the truth was stranger than fiction.
Alas, The Black Count was very much in line with Sublette's book about the inhumanity of mankind. Alex Dumas's life was bookended by watching his brothers all get sold by his father, and then being sold himself although eventually redeemed from slavery on the other side bc he was his father's favorite, to raise passage money for his father's triumphant return to France. My theory on "great people" is that, as described in Outliers, they are born in the right place and time. Dumas received a gentleman's training in riding and fencing, which was the perfect background for a cavalry officer, and his height and bearing gave him the natural charisma to succeed in the turmoil immediately after the revolution. (Being recklessly brave also helped.) He was also fortunate enough to live in a brief shining moment in French history when being half-black was okay - one of the things the French Revolution got right was extending some freedoms to free blacks.
Edmund Dantes fell afoul of Napoleonic supporters: Dumas pissed off Napoleon himself. Some of it was that he treated his defeated foes with basic decency, unlike many of his peers. My theory is that part of this was bc he married a girl in an area where he was camped. I wonder how often he looked at those he'd defeated and thought about how he'd want his father-in-law treated. Oh, and seeing slavery up close and personally in his youth probably didn't hurt his compassion either.
Unfortunately for Dumas, Napoleon was a douche bag who couldn't be arsed to trade for him and the Neopolitans had a real hate-on for the French, which led to his poisoning in prison. I wish the book had gotten more explicitly drawn the connections between Dumas' upbringing, the philosophies of the time, and what he did, instead of baldly reciting his history and that of Napoleon's armies. Worse still for Dumas, Napoleon rolled back the French Revolution's innovations in treatment of black people and at the end of his (shortened) life, he had to petition to not be deported from France as a free man of color, even though Napoleon himself had called him the "Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol".
With such a life story, I thought the book would be a bestseller, but ultimately the author's decision to focus on race history instead of derring-do made it a lot less interesting to read than, say, Alexander Dumas' books.
Which meant it was about 40% colonial history of North America and 40% race history and relations. As the toehold of France and Spain into British North America and the gateway between South America's mining, the Caribbean's sugar plantations, and the farmers of the new United States, there's a lot of history. Our visit to the site of the Battle of New Orleans made me realize there was more to the story than what I'd learned in school; The World that Made New Orleans made me realize there's a lot more, that the first half of the nineteenth century was a lot more complicated than the run-up to the Civil War, which is how I learned it in my 3 years in a row of American History.
The history of slavery in the United States was also far more brutal and disgusting than I could've imagined. Sublette's book talks about all the things you can't discuss with high school students, about the motivations and unexpected outcomes of banning importation of slaves in America (it's not philanthropy, it's protectionism) and the economics. The museum in the Cabildo shows how sugar is a much more capital-intensive crop than cotton; Sublette talks about how slaves worked double shifts during harvest and processing because otherwise their down-time maintenance costs would be prohibitive.
Sublette "goes there" and talks about how the best investment a young man could make is to buy a fertile but unpretty young slave, breed her, and sell her children, thus reaping the products of her labor and getting the dividend of children. Moreover, by owning a slave, he gets to call himself a slaveowner and hobnob with the right sort. Sublette asks the reader to consider the psychology of a small child growing up with playmates that he will someday own and use, possibly even sexually.
You can't talk about the history of Louisiana or slavery in the US without mentioning Thomas Jefferson and Sublette hates him more than Brookhiser. For good reason. He quotes from Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia about the differences in the races and Jefferson's prediction that "the real distinctions which nature has made...will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race." Fucking his wife's half-sister was just the tip of the iceberg compared to collaborating with the French Revolution and giving Napoleon carte blanche with regards to Toussaint L'ouverture.
Similarly, The Black Count was supposed to be a book about derring-do and ended up being about race relations in revolutionary and Napoleonic France. The back of the book describes how Alexander Dumas books were all about his stranger-than-fiction father, the bastard child of a French aristocrat on the run and a Haitian woman, who became a general in France's revolutionary army. The first chapter or two makes it clear that Dumas hero-worshipped his father and that in many ways, his popular adventure books were his Mary Sue-ing his father's life. I would've preferred a closer comparison of the literary works to the real-life events that inspired them and more of a discussion of how the truth was stranger than fiction.
Alas, The Black Count was very much in line with Sublette's book about the inhumanity of mankind. Alex Dumas's life was bookended by watching his brothers all get sold by his father, and then being sold himself although eventually redeemed from slavery on the other side bc he was his father's favorite, to raise passage money for his father's triumphant return to France. My theory on "great people" is that, as described in Outliers, they are born in the right place and time. Dumas received a gentleman's training in riding and fencing, which was the perfect background for a cavalry officer, and his height and bearing gave him the natural charisma to succeed in the turmoil immediately after the revolution. (Being recklessly brave also helped.) He was also fortunate enough to live in a brief shining moment in French history when being half-black was okay - one of the things the French Revolution got right was extending some freedoms to free blacks.
Edmund Dantes fell afoul of Napoleonic supporters: Dumas pissed off Napoleon himself. Some of it was that he treated his defeated foes with basic decency, unlike many of his peers. My theory is that part of this was bc he married a girl in an area where he was camped. I wonder how often he looked at those he'd defeated and thought about how he'd want his father-in-law treated. Oh, and seeing slavery up close and personally in his youth probably didn't hurt his compassion either.
Unfortunately for Dumas, Napoleon was a douche bag who couldn't be arsed to trade for him and the Neopolitans had a real hate-on for the French, which led to his poisoning in prison. I wish the book had gotten more explicitly drawn the connections between Dumas' upbringing, the philosophies of the time, and what he did, instead of baldly reciting his history and that of Napoleon's armies. Worse still for Dumas, Napoleon rolled back the French Revolution's innovations in treatment of black people and at the end of his (shortened) life, he had to petition to not be deported from France as a free man of color, even though Napoleon himself had called him the "Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol".
With such a life story, I thought the book would be a bestseller, but ultimately the author's decision to focus on race history instead of derring-do made it a lot less interesting to read than, say, Alexander Dumas' books.