Race, Property Encroachment and Jurisdiction in the 18th Century French Atlantic World: The Case of the Widow Oge

In 1774, Angelique Hosse petitioned the French Conseil Prive to overturn an administrative ruling by that had allowed her neighbors to build a private access road across her coffee plantation in French Saint-Domingue. Was this litigation actually about "race"? Mother of the future "quarteron" revolutionary Vincent Oge, Hosse mentioned neither her color nor her genealogy in her petition, simply qualifying herself as a widow. By contrast, her legal opponents consistently branded her a rebellious "mula tresse". How should historians refer to Angelique Hosse's "race"? Should we respect her own silence? Or should we embrace and arguably reinforce the exclusionary rhetoric of her opponents? Was Hosse a "mulatresse" or not? Rather than dwelling on her "racial status" per se, this article instead uses her litigation to investigate the social, juridical, and administrative practices through which racial identification was contested in 18th century Saint-Domingue. After recounting the history of the litigation from Hosse's own perspective, analyzing it as a dispute over legal servitudes and property rights, the article moves on to place her rhetorical strategy of silence within evolving colonial and imperial debates over the meanings of color, slavery, and race. The article closes by showing how Hosse's opponents, by racializing the litigation in the eyes of the royal council, succeeded in sending it down an administrative black hole, frustrating her pursuit ofjustice. While revealing the practical dynamics of 18th century French colonial and imperial racialization, the history of Hosse's litigation simultaneously illuminates the social origins of the Haitian Revolution.