The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade

A study arguing that the French Atlantic was a cultural system as well as a commercial one — a triangle of ships, commodities, literature, theater, philosophy, forgetting, and moral evasion — that connected the metropolitan ports and intellectuals of France to the plantation violence of Saint-Domingue and West Africa. Miller is especially strong on Nantes, the mercantilist logic of the exclusif, and the way French writers used slavery as metaphor while leaving actual African bondage in the background, making the book a key source for understanding how France engaged with and then suppressed the memory of the slave trade.