Entrepôt of Revolutions: Saint-Domingue, Commercial Sovereignty, and the French–American Alliance by Manuel Covo (review)

Reviewed by: Entrepôt of Revolutions: Saint-Domingue, Commercial Sovereignty, and the French–American Alliance by Manuel Covo Wyatt Wiggins (bio) Keywords Saint-Domingue, France, Slave trade, Global capitalism, Haiti, Haitian revolution Entrepôt of Revolutions: Saint-Domingue, Commercial Sovereignty, and the French–American Alliance. By Manuel Covo. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 320. Cloth, $27.99.) Histories of the French and American revolutions often share a braided story, a narrative that emphasizes the coordination and cooperation between the newly emerging nation and the rapidly transforming empire, unified in their rebuke against Great Britain. Traditionally, this story has been told through the discussion of the enlightened debates happening in Parisian salons and the revolutionary disobedience of rebel patriots in the [End Page 123] continental capitals of Philadelphia and Boston. Manuel Covo's monograph nuances this often repeated story, redirecting focus to the highly coveted French colony of Saint-Domingue. Dubbed the "Pearl of the Caribbean," Saint-Domingue was the most lucrative eighteenth-century colonial possession of any European empire. Accounting for nearly 36 percent of the entire Atlantic slave trade, over 200,000 enslaved people were trafficked to Saint-Domingue for lifetimes of servitude. Trade with this highly coveted colony became integral for establishing the United States commercially on a global stage. By placing trade at the center of the story, Entrepôt of Revolutions destabilizes the French–American alliance from its revolutionary capitals, and instead argues that Saint-Domingue represents the core of eighteenth-century global capitalism, and more importantly, posits that the island should be regarded as the "true center of the [French–American] alliance, an alliance that promised to achieve both French imperial supremacy and the expansion of the United States" (42). In other words, the book showcases how commercial and economic factors influenced and conditioned the course of political change. Covo's book helps historians reconsider the dimensions of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions in an interconnected, commercial story. A key concept Covo uses throughout the monograph is the idea of commercial sovereignty, or the authority of a state to control where, when, and how commerce was conducted. This concept both "connected revolutions and brought them into conflict," as French and English merchants both competed for the dominance of Caribbean trade and cooperated when necessary to maintain its viability (2). Covo's novel approach of interrogating the statecraft of commerce and the politics underlying trans-imperial trade represents the greatest triumph of the book and convincingly forwards the crucial argument that imperial trade and racial capitalism—the idea that racialized exploitation and capital accumulation were mutually reinforcing—define the age of commercial republicanism, with Saint-Domingue at the center. Entrepôt of Revolutions follows the establishment of l'exclusif, or the French commercial policy that established a commercial monopoly, designating France as the sole trading partner for its colonies and forbidding foreign merchant ships from entering French port cities. It is, however, by focusing on the debates around the commercial policy of l'exclusif that Covo demonstrates the authentic political struggle happening at a time when France began experimenting with democracy. For scholars of the [End Page 124] French Revolution, Covo's book is indispensable, as it demonstrates how the Legislative Assembly consolidated the principle behind the colonial monopoly, positioning it as "central to the French Revolution's success" (91). This reveals an essential moment of transition from monarchy to republic, where leading deputies such as Antoine Barnave, Mirabeau, and Brissot argued over what governmental form France would take, while simultaneously remaining a trading empire that enslaved people and controlled markets overseas. Through the lens of commercial sovereignty, we can reevaluate landmark moments in French revolutionary history as well. For example, with the legislation that granted equal rights to free people of color on March 28, 1792, the decree made colonists' payments of debt mandatory, and reasserted the metropole's commercial sovereignty over the colonies (112). Despite the intense political debates happening in Paris over what exact form French commercial policy would take, the actual trading practices in Saint-Domingue, Covo persuasively argues, reshaped the politics of the French–American alliance more than the lawmaking happening in Paris (117). This can be seen...