Embers Burning on the Mountainside: Enslaved People and Political Negotiation in Martinique, 1752-1815

Abstract

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, enslaved people in Martinique acted through the legal and institutional structures of colonial rule, compelling a slaveholding regime built for domination to respond, adjust, and occasionally concede. Embers Burning on the Mountainside examines how enslaved people in Martinique strategically engaged colonial legal and civic institutions to negotiate constrained but real political space within the slaveholding order between 1752 and 1815. Drawing on judicial proceedings, administrative correspondence, military records, manumission petitions, and runaway advertisements, this dissertation reconstructs both enslaved political action and the legal and administrative structures that sustained colonial slavery, revealing the political strategies enslaved actors employed and the porous, contingent regime of power they confronted. This dissertation reconceptualizes enslaved political action through the analytic of negotiation, arguing that colonial power in Martinique operated through a layered legal and administrative order that both stabilized domination and generated points of engagement. Negotiation here does not imply equality or voluntary exchange. Rather, it names encounters in which enslaved actors acted within or against institutional frameworks in ways that compelled authorities to process claims, respond to actions, and adjust the practical operation of colonial governance. The slaveholding regime of Martinique was structured through legal classifications, administrative procedures, and regulated pathways—manumission statutes, military service provisions, mobility regulations, and judicial processes—designed to secure domination while preserving the colony’s administrative functioning. Yet these same mechanisms created obligations, iv procedural openings, and jurisdictional tensions that enslaved actors learned to test and exploit. Across legal petitions for freedom, military service claims, patterns of marronnage that prompted reactive legislation, and collective rebellion that demanded administrative response, enslaved people repeatedly engaged the governing structures of the colony in ways that extracted limited recognition, concessions, and institutional adjustment without dismantling the slaveholding order itself. By centering Martinique, Embers Burning on the Mountainside reconsiders how enslaved political action unfolded in a colony where slavery endured rather than collapsed during the Age of Revolutions. Martinique instead reveals a different trajectory: a colony in which slavery survived repeated war, revolt, marronnage, and legal contestation by continually adjusting its practices in response to pressure from below. This study demonstrates that enslaved actors reshaped the practical operation of colonial governance by compelling institutional responses, revealing the slaveholding order to be more contingent and vulnerable to sustained challenge than its claims to total domination allowed. In Martinique, enslaved politics did not always arrive as rupture. More often it appeared as a slow accumulation of pressure—embers burning within the institutions of colonial rule, forcing the regime to answer even those it claimed the power to silence.