Tocqueville on the Abolition of Slavery in the French Caribbean: The Preemptive Dispossession and Proletarianization of Black Workers

Abstract: This paper brings together Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on enslavement and emancipation in the United States and the French Empire to trace how his project to abolish slavery in the French Caribbean relied on the use of coercive state power to temporarily truncate the property rights of Black workers and steal part of their wages. Highlighting how Tocqueville proposed forcing ex-slaves into conditions of landlessness and partial wagelessness, I conceptualize these processes respectively as preemptive dispossession and preemptive proletarianization. Attention to Tocqueville's emancipation prescriptions underscores the transnational scope and entanglements of political economy and processes of racialization in his political theory of empire and slavery.