To aid scholars in their analysis of these censuses and maps, the website will also provide interpretive tools in the form of critical essays, timelines, and bibliographies with suggestions for further reading and research. The essays will be the essence of this analytical armory. The purpose of the essays is to explore the ways that census records and maps may masquerade as “objective fact” whereas closer analysis reveals a tumultuous world of data that, in turn, points to larger transformations that occurred in the French Caribbean over the eighteenth century.
For example, one essay will contexutalize the changes to the racial categories used in the censuses within an evolving French legal system that increasingly codified and regulated racial distinctions and inequality. As a result of these revisions, individuals were reclassified (or sometimes omitted) from one census to the next. Thus, the population numbers and demographic trends suggested by the census records have to be critically assessed. Similarly, the gradual disapperance of milita information from the census records reflects the changing administrative and bureaucratic organization of the French islands. Yet another will offer critical insights into the projection systems used by eighteenth century cartographers, thereby helping to explain some of the idiosycricies that the modern eye dismisses as “inaccurate.” We will recruit experts to write these essays, which we plan to include on the website in three languages: English, French, and Haitian Creole. The essays and other interpretative tools are one of the ways that this project to make this data and history accessible to scholars old and new as well as to foster critical analysis of quantitative and visual historical sources.