Download e-book for iPad: Wealth and Disaster by Pierre Force

In 1729, Marc-Antoine Lamerenx, a minor French nobleman, set sail for Saint-Domingue. 20 years later, peasant Jean Mouscardy additionally made the lengthy and tough trip to Saint-Domingue. even supposing the lads weren't similar and had little in universal, they hailed from an identical Pyrenean city, l. a. Bastide Clairence. within the New international, they either settled in Saint-Martin-du-Dondon, the place they made their fortunes growing to be espresso. After the Haitian slave insurrection uprooted them, a few of their descendants stayed in Haiti and participated in construction the recent country. Others took safe haven in France, began companies in New Orleans, or transferred their slaves and their Haitian adventure to new espresso plantations in Cuba.

Wealth and Disaster follows the emigrant Lamerenx and Mouscardy households over 3 generations and diverse destinations around the Caribbean. Pierre strength lines their white and mixed-race descendants from the early-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries and over a long time of comings and goings among their French ancestral city and Saint-Domingue, Cuba, and New Orleans. an opportunity come across in a French archive led strength to discover an epic saga, a desirable and character-driven tale of pirates, revolution, fabulous riches, monetary ruination, usual catastrophe, harsh imprisonment, and the increase of the plantation economy.

By watching the circulate of some members among the Pyrenees and the Caribbean, strength is ready to convey how those worlds grew to become interconnected. Arguing that who emigrated and the way relied on one’s place within the Pyrenean house-based procedure, strength additionally finds how capital accumulation in Saint-Domingue depended on Pyrenean networks and the way, in flip, wealth obtained in the USA replaced the principles of the sport again domestic. a thrilling and available heritage, Wealth and catastrophe offers riveting perception into the matrimonial suggestions and inheritance customs of French rural society and the ensuing offerings to to migrate or to stay.