CHANGING AGRICULTURAL LAND USE ON GUADELOUPE, FRENCH WEST INDIES¹

1 Data for this study were collected while the writer was engaged in field research supported by the Foreign Research Program and under the direction of the Division of Earth Sciences, National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council, and financed by the Geography Branch of the Office of Naval Research under contract Nonr-2300(09).

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Notes

1 Data for this study were collected while the writer was engaged in field research supported by the Foreign Research Program and under the direction of the Division of Earth Sciences, National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council, and financed by the Geography Branch of the Office of Naval Research under contract Nonr-2300(09).

2 For the purposes of this study, the term “Guadeloupe” is confined to the islands of Grande- and Basse-Terre. Politically Guadeloupe encompasses several other much smaller islands such as la Desirade, les Saintes, and Marie Galente. On these small islands, agriculture is limited to subsistence crops, except on Marie Galente where small amounts of sugar cane are produced.

3 Crops used for subsistence by the local population are grouped under the term “provisions,” for they may be cultivated either on the subsistence level or for sale in a local market. The various plants are intertilled, and the composition of the provisions fields varies seasonally.

4 Guy Lasserre, “Une Plantation de canne aux Antilles: La Sucrerie Beauport,”Les Cahiers d'Outre-Mer, V (Oct.–Dec., 1952), pp. 297–329, gives analysis of one of these plantations.

5 Maurice Satineau, Histoire de la Guadeloupe sous L'Ancien Régime (Paris: Payot, 1928), pp. 21–22.

6 Stewart L. Mims, Colbert's West India Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912), p. 25.

7 Ibid.

8 Auguste Rochette, Etude sur les Rapports Commerciaux de la France et de ses Colonies (Paris: A. Pedone, 1897), pp. 43–44.

9 Rochette, op. cit., pp. 8–10.

10 Satineau, op. cit., pp. 120–121.

11 Jules Ballet, “The Ballet Manuscripts” (Departmental Archives of Guadeloupe), Vol. VII, p. 128.

12 Shepard B. Clough, France: A History of National Economics; 1789–1939 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939), pp. 42 et passim.

13 Rochette, op. cit., pp. 28–29.

14 Charles Robequain, “Le Sucre dans l'Union Francaise,”Annales de Géographie, LVII (October–December, 1948), p. 328.

15 Louis Joubert, “Les Conséquences Géographiques de l'Emancipation des Noirs aux Antilles (1848),”Les Cahiers d'Outre-Mer, I (April-June, 1948), pp. 105–118.

16 A. Kopp, “l'Agriculture a la Guadeloupe,”Annales de Géographie, XXXIX (1929), p. 490, believes that the hurricane of 1775 led to a shift in production from coffee to sugar.