University of Florida

Graduate Student, History

Liberal Arts and Sciences

Thesis Title: Foot Soldiers: Poorer Whites and the Colonization of West Province, Saint-Domingue, 1681-1789

About

Robert D. Taber is a doctoral candidate in Caribbean History at the University of Florida. His dissertation draws on notary records from four towns in West Province, Saint-Domingue to examine changing patterns of patronage and social mobility from the take-off of the sugar economy to the French Revolution.  Focusing on poorer white employees on plantations and in the port towns, including their relationships with slaves, free people of color, and wealthier whites, it shows how the employees’ desire for socioeconomic advancement perpetuated and strengthened the institutions of slavery and racism.  This dissertation explores the connections linking the socioeconomic tensions between poorer whites and free people of color to the outbreak of civil war in Haiti following the fall of the Bastille, which led to the Haitian Revolution. His research has been supported by grants from the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and Phi Alpha Theta. 

Other topics of interest include the role of tobacco in British and French colonization projects in the early seventeenth century and trade between Saint-Domingue and British North America.

He has previously worked as a researcher for the Center for Population Economics and has taught a class on the Age of Atlantic Revolutions that examined events in France, Haiti, and Spanish America.  He expects to defend his dissertation in Fall 2012.

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