The last resort of the slave: Fire and labour in the late nineteenth-century French Caribbean

Abstract

Whether by accident or by will, the French Caribbean repeatedly erupted into flames at the end of the nineteenth century, leading Guadeloupe's governor to recall 'when the torch was the only instrument of vengeance left to the slave'. This article critically juxtaposes colonial officials' accusations of incendiarism against labourers' everyday use of fire and the commonplaceness of accidents and natural catastrophes. Providing an environmental 'history from below', it demonstrates how a fundamental continuity in the use, knowledge and political power of fire bridged the slaves' transformation into wage labourers during the nineteenth century. Reading against the grain of official sources to describe the social and political world of the Antillean labourer, this article explains how labour unrest and the subsequent governmental response uncovered islanders' liminal status as workers demanding, like their white metropolitan counterparts, a liveable wage, and also as former slaves labouring under the thumb of an exploitative economic regime forged during the age of slavery and haunted by fire, the perennial ecological hazard and weapon of the disenfranchised in the Caribbean.