Chapter 3 shows that the ICI ousted indigenous experts and administrators by sending allegedly well-prepared and well-resourced Europeans to the colonies. Using comparison to determine a best practice of colonial administration, ICI members reformed the training schools for European administrators. However, misinterpretations often characterized their comparisons. Stereotype and archetype-comparisons gave rise to the idea that the Dutch Indies was the most professional and rational empire, while prototype-comparisons disproved this idea. According to the Dutch model, administrators should be specialists in native culture, resistant to the tropical climate, and rule independently of the “unprofessional” bureaucracy in the mother country. In reality, ICI members evoked an idealized Dutch stereotype to impose their interests of increasing salaries, health insurance benefits, and old-age pensions for their careers. While ICI members also co-opted indigenous expert-administrators, they excluded them from these benefits. Around 1914, the number of European employees had doubled in many colonies and they ousted indigenous experts. Non-Europeans hitherto complained to lack “the prospect of advancing through eagerness and seniority.” Indeed, the ICI favored internationalization of colonial staff over indigenization and thus belied its own principles of indirect rule.

Chapter 3 explores the French government’s quest to appease its recalcitrant white planter elite in the Îles du Vent between the Seven Years War and the French Revolution and the unexpected consequences of these efforts. In 1759, the crown created three chambres mi-parties d’agriculture et de commerce in its Caribbean colonies in which planter elites could discuss the means and obstacles to French colonial prosperity. Additionally, it invited a colonial deputy from each chamber to join metropolitan deputes in the Royal Council of Commerce in Paris. The chapter argues that this reform moved the main French sugar colonies closer to the status of an overseas province. It further reveals how reform generated opportunities for the colonial elite to develop a creole political economic discourse with which to promote their own economic interests against the metropole. Focusing on Martinique’s chambre mi-partie d’agriculture et de commerce and its successor institutions, it exposes planters’ eclectic appropriation of economic ideas in circulation – including those of the Physiocrats – to defend their fiscal, commercial, and legal colonial interests. Years of rehearsing their creole perspective would stand them in good stead when French revolutionaries gave white planters a voice within the new French National Assembly in 1789.