Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World

Nancy Christie is Research Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. She has published widely in the fields of empire, gender, law and the state. Michael Gauvreau is Professor of History at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. He researches in the intellectual, religious, and social history of Canada and Quebec. Matthew Gerber is Associate Professor of History at University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. He specializes in the history of early modern France and its colonies.

Part I: Reading Colonial Legal Records Against the Grain 1. Controlling Haitian History: The Legal Archive of Moreau de Saint-Méry 2. Proof of Freedom, Proof of Enslavement: The Limits of Documentation in Colonial Saint-Domingue Part II: Between Metropole and Periphery 3. Silencing Madmen: The Legal Process of Interdiction, Saint-Domingue, Eighteenth Century 4. The Treatment of Domestic Servants in Canada’s Justice System Under the French Regime: A Conciliatory Approach? 5. Contesting the Seigneurial Corvée: Two Generations of Peasant Litigation in Eighteenth-Century Angoumois Part III: Chains of Property and Obligation 6. Between Property and Person: The Ambiguous Status of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue 7. Trust, Obligation, and the Racialized Credit Market in Pre-Revolutionary Cap Français 8. The Inhabitants "Appear Are Not Such Fools as a Menny Thinks": Credit, Debt, and Peasant Litigation in Post-Conquest Quebec Part IV: Circuits of Power and the Testimony of the Marginal 9. The Voice of the Litigant, the Voice of the Spokesman?: The Role of Interpreters in Trials in Canada under the French Regime (17th and 18th Centuries) 10. Voices of Litigating Women in New France During the 17th and 18th Centuries: Elements of Research on the Judicial Culture of the Appellants in the Archives of the Royal Jurisdiction of Montreal (1693–1760) 11. Slaves as Witnesses, Slaves as Evidence: French and British Prosecution of the Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean Part V: Divided Sovereignties, Legal Hybridities 12. When French Islands Became British: Law, Property, and Inheritance in the Ceded Islands 13. Contested Spaces of Law and Economy: Legal Hybridity and the Marital Economy Within Quebec’s Merchant Communities