Orfila names toxicology and leaves the colonial poison trials out

Mathieu Orfila published his Traite des poisons in Paris in 1814. It set out to catalogue every known poison and to serve courts as well as physicians, and it gave a name to a new field, toxicology, a word coined for the purpose. Translations into English, Italian, German and Hungarian followed almost at once, and three French editions appeared inside a decade. Orfila ran his own experiments on mercury sublimate, arsenic and antimony. For the arrow poisons of the Amazon and the Orinoco, and for plants used against snakebite in New Granada, he simply cited other people. What the book leaves out is the trials then filling colonial courtrooms. Enslaved and free people of African descent were being tried for poisoning in Suriname and Martinique while he wrote, and his illustrative cases are a toddler who ate rat poison, a young woman who put arsenic in her soup, and a man who took too much opium.

Dupuy describes the post-independence state as divided from the start between the older property-owning and slave-owning affranchis, usually called mulattoes although the group included Black members, and a newer Black property-owning class formed during Louverture's rule and after independence. Their fight for control of the state produced fourteen years of civil war before Boyer reunited the country. Dupuy's argument is about consequences rather than personalities. The factional conflict blocked any developmental project, and the class structure it left behind, a dominant class living off commerce, finance and import and export tied to the world market and the state, and a peasantry growing food and some export crops, made industrialisation impossible in the nineteenth century. That weakness is what let French, English, German and later American capital take a dominant position by the end of the century, in what he calls a neocolonial turn.

Between May 1809 and January 1810 the mayor of New Orleans counted nine thousand and fifty nine people arriving from eastern Cuba, most of them out of Santiago de Cuba and Baracoa, with only one vessel coming from Havana. Further landings in the early months of 1810 carried the total past ten thousand. The mayor sorted them into the three legal categories that had governed Saint-Domingue and that also governed Louisiana. Two thousand seven hundred and thirty one were counted as white, three thousand one hundred and two as free people of colour, and three thousand two hundred and twenty six as slaves. The three groups were almost equal in size. Orleans Parish had held seventeen thousand people in 1806. The arrivals came to more than the entire growth of the white and enslaved populations of the parish between 1806 and 1810, and they roughly doubled the population of the city itself.

Geggus treats the conspiracy organised in Havana by the free black carpenter José Antonio Aponte as the most striking instance of Haitian influence on slave resistance elsewhere. He is careful about the general claim. News spread wide and fast, with Jamaican slaves singing about the North Plain rising within a month, but contemporaries and historians have often exaggerated the importance of the factor. His larger irony is economic: by driving up world prices for tropical produce and creating a refugee diaspora that settled new land in Cuba, Jamaica, Louisiana and Trinidad, the revolution spread slavery to new frontiers and revived older plantation economies. Although it freed half a million people directly and more than six hundred thousand across the French colonies, and closed the slave trade's largest market, the overall volume of the Atlantic trade scarcely fell from its peak in the 1780s. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus argues it is difficult to believe fear of rebellion was a major factor in outlawing the slave trade, and holds that Britain abolished its trade in 1807 not from fear of West Indian revolt but because the revolution had destroyed France as a colonial rival, freeing British politicians to vote their consciences.