Chapter 12
Testamentary manumission and emotional bonds in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue
Plantation slavery brought whites and people of color into constant intimate contact in a system
of intense forcible domination and subordination. This generated powerful emotions on the part of both enslavers and
the enslaved. A close reading of one testament from eighteenth-century French Saint-Domingue suggests that systems of
enslavement prompted a range of emotions on the part of white slave owners. While the emotional responses of the
enslaved are much more difficult to identify, this example suggests that emotions played a key role in leading to or
discouraging manumission. Why else would the wealthy, childless widow Marie-Magdeleine Rossignol manumit nine slaves
in her will?
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