The Journal de Saint-Domingue joined the Affiches Américaines in encouraging White male colonists to consider themselves members of an “enlightened” and distinctively “American” citizenry devoted to reason and the common good. While acknowledging metropolitan precedents for a general-interest publication, its editors trumpeted their publication’s novelty, claimed all of “America” as their journalistic jurisdiction, and stated their intention to generate original content, not just reprint metropolitan articles. The monthly Journal fostered the creation of American “taste” by publishing reviews and critiquing poetry by colonists. With strong ties to the local Chambres d’Agriculture and strong support from planter subscribers, it also published extensively on agriculture (Chapter 11). With the Affiches, it created a forum where colonists could appropriate the intellectually respectable terms of “political economy,” combining them with a robust rhetoric of citizenship to respond to criticism from merchants and metropolitan chambers of commerce; debate the reimposition of the trade restrictions of the Exclusif and proposed limitations on sugar refining; and seek to redefine the colony-metropole relationship.

Chapter 3 explores the French government’s quest to appease its recalcitrant white planter elite in the Îles du Vent between the Seven Years War and the French Revolution and the unexpected consequences of these efforts. In 1759, the crown created three chambres mi-parties d’agriculture et de commerce in its Caribbean colonies in which planter elites could discuss the means and obstacles to French colonial prosperity. Additionally, it invited a colonial deputy from each chamber to join metropolitan deputes in the Royal Council of Commerce in Paris. The chapter argues that this reform moved the main French sugar colonies closer to the status of an overseas province. It further reveals how reform generated opportunities for the colonial elite to develop a creole political economic discourse with which to promote their own economic interests against the metropole. Focusing on Martinique’s chambre mi-partie d’agriculture et de commerce and its successor institutions, it exposes planters’ eclectic appropriation of economic ideas in circulation – including those of the Physiocrats – to defend their fiscal, commercial, and legal colonial interests. Years of rehearsing their creole perspective would stand them in good stead when French revolutionaries gave white planters a voice within the new French National Assembly in 1789.