Considérations sur les rapports qui doivent exister entre les colonies et les métropoles, et particulièrement sur l'état actuel du Commerce Français dans les Antilles, relativement à celui qu'y font les Étrangers.
8vo (19.3x12.5cm), (1-3) pp, 4-127 pp. Modern bradel binding with gray paper covers, title stamped in black on spine. Soiling on p. 87, otherwise a fresh copy. A very rare tract urging the French government to allow its colonies in the Antilles to trade with England as well as to improve colonial laws and the conditions of slaves, written by the French royal physician on the island of Saint Lucia, Jean-Baptiste Cassan. The treatise provides valuable detailed information on colonial economy, laws, and the position of the enslaved African people in the Antilles. Written amid a subsistence crisis in the French island colonies, caused by grain shortages in France in 1788-89, it advocates for lifting the ban on colonial trade with England. In addition, it offers ideas on gradually emancipating the slaves. Seen as contrary to the revolutionary principles of justice and liberty, slavery was denounced by many public figures in France, yet there was also a sense that an abrupt abolition of slavery would have catastrophic effects for colonial trade and for metropolitan economy. Cassan supported the latter view, writing that the "colonies would be destroyed" if enslaved African people were to be suddenly declared free (pp. 91 ff). However, four years later, Cassan celebrated the decree of the National Convention to abolish slavery with a four-page "patriotic hymn," praising the humanity of the decision. Jean-Baptiste Cassan was a medical doctor and a diplomat. From 1786 to 1793, he served as the royal physician on the French island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean. In 1786, Saint Lucia was a small colony, with a population of about 20,000 people, 80 % of which were slaves. In 1793, Cassan was forced to leave Saint Lucia when France and England resumed hostilities in the Caribbean. Following a short stay in Philadelphia, he returned to France, where he worked as a doctor in Brest only to leave for Cayenne in 1798. He was a member of several societies, including the Académie royale de Marine and the Société royale de Medicine, and was an active correspondent of the Ministere de la Marine, the Société Royale d'Agriculture, and the Académie Royale de Bordeaux. Alongside the church, the navy, and the army, French physicians played a crucial role in French efforts to maintain overseas colonies. "These royal physicians served as local agents for the construction of colonial knowledge, conducting research on the spot" (McClellan, Regourd, p. 34). In addition to performing medical duties, they were expected to collect information on natural history and often send botanical and animal specimens back home. A true polymath, Cassan wrote on a variety of subjects that extended far beyond his medical expertise, including fossils, volcanoes, and insects. The publisher of this treatise, Jean-François-Hubert Guillot (d. 1792), operated his own press in Paris for two years, before being sentenced to death for printing forged assignats in his underground printing press in Passy. OCLC locates only one copy of the book in the U.S.--at the University of Maryland. *Hogg, The African Slave Trade and its Suppression: A Classified and Annotated Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Articles (2006), 1119; Regourd, "Sur les traces du docteur Cassan, médecin des Lumières à Sainte-Lucie," in Pelletier, ed., Les îles, du mythe à la réalité, Actes du 123e Congrès national des sociétés historiques et scientifiques (1998), p.189-202; Whiteman, Reform, Revolution and French Global Policy, 1787-1791 (2003), pp. 174 ff; McClellan, Regourd, "The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Regime," Osiris 2/15 (2000), pp. 31-50; Sainton, Histoire et Civilisation de la Caraïbe (2012), vol. 2, pp. 93, 190, 225; "Jean-François-Hubert Guillot (17..-1792)" in BnF Data.
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