A Conversation with Ned Sublette
by Habitus · 09/16/08
For musician and historian Ned Sublette, New Orleans is a city of global significance that is also “an alternative American history in itself.” His book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, is a painstaking and imaginative recreation of the city’s first hundred years. By carefully decoding the influences that shaped it, he has created a vivid portrait of the city we know today.
Sublette approaches the history of New Orleans largely though its music, and he hears in the city an expansive dialogue that reaches back to Europe and Africa and across the Americas. “The whole history of New Orleans is Diasporas,” he tells us—a place where myriad cultural inputs were preserved, integrated, and exported to the world.
Some people call New Orleans the least American city. Your book illustrates that the city is deeply singular, but also profoundly connected to the history and culture of the nation, the region, and the world.
I think it’s the most American city. It’s as fundamental to the history of the nation as Philadelphia or Boston or New York. New Orleans is the logical outcome of competing international forces, meeting in a peculiar geography.
Haiti and Cuba are also central players in your version of the history of New Orleans. What do those places have to do with the city?
There are three things I want people to keep in mind:
The first is the centrality of Havana. Havana was the most important city in the hemisphere, especially if we are talking about music, and music is my way of looking at history. At the time of the American Revolution, it was larger than any city in English-speaking North America. It was the hub—it was a great city when New Orleans was just a village, or New York for that matter. And New Orleans had an ongoing relationship with Havana, an intimate commercial relationship that lasted for 190 years. It began during the Spanish colonization of New Orleans and it continued until the imposition of the embargo by President Kennedy. The embargo of Cuba is also an embargo of New Orleans, and if you want to get the economy of New Orleans going again, end the embargo of Cuba.
Number two is the importance of the Haitian Revolution—certainly to hemispheric history, but also in world history. For many years, it was almost entirely left out of the narrative. If you read books on the French Revolution, of which the Haitian Revolution was a concomitant part, you rarely even find a mention of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Port-au-Prince. But it was part of the French Revolution, and it was its most radical achievement: the immediate and unconditional end of slavery, and the making of former slaves into full citizens of the French Republic. The Revolution completely changed the game structurally in hemispheric politics. Among other things, and most important to our story, it triggered the sale of Louisiana at a bargain price by Napoleon to Jefferson’s men.
The third thing that happened was the ending of the transatlantic slave trade: the importation of persons, as our Constitution calls it, from Africa. Hardly anyone knows when that date was: January 1, 1808. We just had the bicentennial of it; but it’s not something we commemorate, because then we’d have to explain what happened in the fifty-five years after that.
It might have sounded like a humanitarian gesture to end the transatlantic slave trade, but it was simply protectionism. The slaveholders in Virginia and Maryland had surplus labor to sell to the vastly expanding markets in the South that were growing cotton and, after 1795 in Louisiana, were growing sugar, which consumed laborers and required their frequent replacement. This is what historians have politely called the interstate slave trade, and with it came a slave-breeding industry.
All three of these things converged in New Orleans.
How did the successive waves of imperial control change the nature of life and culture in New Orleans? You start your history of the city, for example, in 1492.
New Orleans was the valve for the flow of money. The money was in Havana. The United States didn’t have a single silver or gold mine, even after annexing Louisiana, which is why it was such a big deal when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California. New Orleans was a place for American merchants to get hard currency. The Spanish peso was the world’s currency. Spain and Portugal were the important players early on, especially in terms of bringing slaves to the New World. The French colonization of the New World, later on, was much smaller.
There is an idea that New Orleans is a French town. I’d say, instead, there was an ideology of French-ness that people clung to, even though, as an actual colonial master, France had a very thin and brief hold over Louisiana. But the idea of being French had a hold on the imagination of these people who were not, by French law, French.
Alongside the major colonial layers, you show a kind of mirror image to these powerful players in the waves of Africans that each empire brought to Louisiana.
New Orleans is sacred ground for African Americans. It’s the most important black city. It was a place of unparalleled importance to the development of African-American music—which is to say, American music. All my research has confirmed for me something that might seem intuitively obvious: from the very beginning, Afro-Louisiana had a distinct personality.
New Orleans had the unique fortune, or fate, to be colonized within a span of about fifty years by Spain, France, and Virginia. Each of these had distinctly different laws governing the possibilities for black people. And they also had very distinct black populations associated with each group.
During the French period, about two-thirds of the Africans brought to Louisiana were from the Senegambia region. Senegambian slaves were brought to French and English territories, but the Spanish did not want them.
