If there is any criticism I have encountered concerning the work, it is that the most fundamental figures in the text, the matriarch Rosalie and her daughter Elizabeth, fade out of the account without sufficient resolution. This challenge is delivered in the exceedingly detailed stories of the Tinchant brothers, which makes up most of the content and it is one that is progressively unveiled with each transnational exploit.

The authors account, in many ways, challenges our current of understanding of globalization as being a distinctly recent phenomenon. The story of Rosalie’s daughter and her progeny, a family of French, Afro-Caribbean, Creole entrepreneurs, reveals the profound complexity of social and ethnic hybridity. I personally found the book to be a compelling historical account which really represents the latest historiography in the area of Atlantic studies. Additionally, this book is sure to strike a certain cord with cigar aficionados. It would be of great interest not only to scholars of African American history and Atlantic studies alike, but, in my opinion, also to both amateurs and specialists in the fields of economics, law, and diplomatics. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.įreedom Papers is a fascinating historical read. Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect.

Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie's great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana's state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family's quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean.

Freedom Papers by Rebecca J. Scott