A Port City of the French Empire and the Greater Caribbean

Abstract

This chapter argues that racial formation did not take place in French New Orleans in isolation from the rest of the Atlantic world and that imperial rather than trans-imperial relationships were the most influential in shaping the way the local society developed. Within the imperial framework, connections between the colony and the metropole were increasingly replaced by intercolonial exchanges. Saint-Domingue, in particular, was a model to be emulated. What gave New Orleans its Caribbean character was, not its participation in smuggling, but racial slavery.