Economic incentives outweighed official pressure for white men to marry free women of color
Evidence
There were those who were wary of such marriages and other unions between white men and women of African descent. In 1723 the intendant of Saint-Domingue wrote to request that French orphan girls be sent to provide wives for young men who used the “lack of white women” as a pretext to “stay in their libertinage with the négresses, ” becoming seditious vagabonds instead of productive settlers. But despite the increasing presence of European women in the colony over the next decades, there remained powerful economic motivations for European men to connect themselves with the free-colored community. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 223
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- Economic motives kept white men marrying into the free-colored elite (similarity 0.93)
- Interracial unions with enslaved women created the free-colored class. (similarity 0.82)
- Wealth passed through free women of color, not their white husbands. (similarity 0.82)
- Whites sustained intimate family ties to people of color they legally degraded (similarity 0.82)
- Racist marriage laws pushed free women of color into compensated partnerships. (similarity 0.80)
- Raimond blamed white men’s sexual desire for colonial racial hierarchy (similarity 0.80)
- Racist marriage laws drove free women of color into concubinage (similarity 0.79)
- Racist marriage laws punished white men yet did not stop cohabitation (similarity 0.78)