A Civilization That Perished: The Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti

An encyclopedic colonial description of pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue written by a white creole lawyer and administrator from exile as the world he knew collapsed — unmatched for urban and domestic detail on Cap-François, street markets, racial dress codes, plantation layout, and African-descended cultural life, while translating domination into nostalgia. Moreau's obsessive racial taxonomy (128 categories based on ancestry percentages) and his treatment of the colonial order as civilizational achievement reveal the mentality of the ruling colonial elite with unusual clarity, making the text richest when read against the grain alongside corrective scholarship.