Practice question · Multiple choice
Saint-Domingue was the world’s most profitable colony and was worked by around half a million enslaved people, in the same decades in which Enlightenment writers argued for universal rights. How should a historian handle that combination?
Hints
- Ask who paid for the salons and where the sugar and coffee came from.
- Treating the contradiction as marginal requires separating things that contemporaries did not separate.
Show the answer
C. As central evidence on the era, since the same economies and people sustained both
Why
Colonial profits financed metropolitan wealth, and several prominent proponents of liberty invested in or defended slavery while others attacked it. Setting the contradiction aside as an inconsistency assumes the two worlds were separate, and they were the same world; naming it is not moralising but an accurate description of the economy the ideas grew in.
Practise The Late Eighteenth Century and the Debate over Modernity
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