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Microhistory Set In Motion: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

Sidney Mintz’s Worker in the Cane is a model life history, uncovering the subtlest of dynamics within plantation society by tracing the experiences of a single individual and his family. By contrast, Mintz’s Sweetness and Power gains its force from taking the entire Atlantic world as its scope, examining the marketing, meanings, and consumption of sugar as they changed over time. This essay borrows from each of these two strategies, looking at the history of a single peripatetic family across three long-lived generations, from enslavement in West Africa in the eighteenth century through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution in the …