Dossiers from the translator's table

The working dossier on MacKinnon's Estate runs from the mid-eighteenth-century notarial drafts that fix the property in St John, Antigua, to the British compensation schedules of the 1830s and the family settlements that follow into the 1840s. The translator's interest is in the parallel French Antillean correspondence that surrounds the estate's English-language paper trail — letters, draft contracts and merchant entries held mostly at ANOM in Aix-en-Provence — and in the way the Antiguan property is described in those French sources when the family is also active in Martinique and Guadeloupe. The dossier holds a sequence of bilingual transcripts, a concordance of the family names that appear under varying spellings, and a small set of photographs of the surviving folios. It does not undertake to read the estate as a single legal entity; instead it lays out the parallel registers from which any single reading would have to be reconstructed.

Habitation Ducanton stands close to Le Lamentin in central Martinique, on the lower slopes between the bay and the inland hills. The estate's notarial paper trail runs from the years before the Revolution to the years after emancipation, and it includes a long sequence of plantation registers, three marriage settlements that move plantation interests between adjacent estates, and a compensation claim filed in the 1840s by a metropolitan branch of the owning family. The translator's working files keep the registers in the order of issue, with bilingual transcripts of the marriage settlements and a parallel-column transcript of the compensation claim against its supporting affidavits. The dossier proposes that Ducanton is best read not as a single estate but as a family of properties held by the same owners across two communes, and that the working notes on the atelier — the enslaved workforce — should be read across the whole family rather than at one estate.

The Dubuc family kept Caravelle on the eastern coast of Martinique from the seventeenth century onward, and the surviving notarial record between the Revolution and the early 1830s preserves enough to follow the property as it passes through marriages, partitions and litigation. The translator's dossier collects three groups of materials: the notarial drafts from Saint-Pierre and Fort-Royal that establish the partitions of the 1790s; the inventories prepared after the deaths of two heads of family in the early nineteenth century; and the letters from a Bordeaux merchant house that advanced credit to the estate in the 1810s. The bilingual edition focuses on the inventories, where the working glossary of the atelier and the running list of estate buildings give a small grammar of how a French Antillean inventory is composed. The dossier closes with photographs of the surviving Caravelle estate buildings, included for orientation rather than as documentary evidence.

Habitation Roy at Petit-Bourg in Guadeloupe runs through the first half of the nineteenth century in the surviving departmental records as a coffee and then a sugar estate, with manumissions, marriage acts and successions taking up most of the working file. The translator's dossier on Roy is the smallest in this collection and reads as a single concentrated case: a manumission folio of 1832, the marriage of a freed woman recorded in 1835, and a succession in 1856 in which her descendants appear as named beneficiaries. The bilingual transcripts make visible the formulas used to record acts of freeing under the July Monarchy, and the working glossary records the diplomatic shapes of these instruments in the years immediately before the abolition law of 1848. The dossier also opens a small concordance against parish entries from the same commune, which preserve some of the spellings that drop out of the notarial folios.

The Beauvallon dossier is a working file on a Marie-Galante estate whose paper trail runs almost entirely through Grand-Bourg between 1820 and 1858. The estate appears in three successive marriage settlements that connect Marie-Galante owners with families established in Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre, and in a long sequence of cadastre extracts that record changes in boundary as parcels are partitioned. The translator's working notes pay particular attention to two recurring problems: the inconsistency between the cadastre and the marriage settlements over the extent of the estate, and the inconsistency between the French and English drafts of one settlement over the marital regime it adopts. The dossier proposes a small editorial convention for marking both inconsistencies in bilingual editions without resolving them.

The Coussans dossier is the most recent in the working file and the one most closely connected to the cross-archive concordance that runs through the translator's other commissions. The estate sits at Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe, and its mid-nineteenth-century paper trail includes a French Antillean succession of the late 1830s, a British compensation claim of the same period filed by a Glasgow-based heir, and a long correspondence between the metropolitan owners and a Pointe-à-Pitre merchant house. The bilingual edition reads the succession and the compensation claim as two readings of the same labour history, made for two different administrative purposes; the correspondence provides the connecting thread. The dossier closes with a brief note on how the working glossary of plantation property changes between the French and the English documents, and how the changes might be read as evidence of administrative culture rather than of estate practice.