DescriptionThe crisis of French colonial society during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras produced fragmentation along factional and racial lines and the displacement of more than 30,000 people around the Atlantic World. Émigrés, refugees, and other assorted displaced people became central to debates about the future of the colonial system, and they forged new transimperial ties of interest and ideology. This dissertation explores the experience and consequences of colonial exile and its connections to the broader questions of property, race, and imperial mission for both revolutionary France and its imperial rival, Britain. It argues that exile and counterrevolution helped to transform the relationship between European empires at turn of the nineteenth century, cementing a more pan-European conception of imperial rule over the non-European world.
Attempts to classify, monitor, and regulate displaced people by a jostling assortment of colonial, metropolitan, and diplomatic actors became central to the politics of revolution in the Caribbean, while the economic ventures of both exiles and the property they left behind became inextricable from the fate of the slave-based plantation economy. The British occupation of French colonies and alliance with colonial counterrevolutionaries newly entangled the British empire with French problems and perspectives surrounding racial hierarchy and colonial law and governance. Meanwhile, exiles played a vital role in shaping historical understandings of the colonial crisis, above all the successful challenge to slavery by the Haitian Revolution. In all these respects, the reactions to and against the revolutionary upheavals in the colonial world helped to shape the global order that would succeed them.