Review: Atlas of the French overseas departments. 2. Martinique

Summary

Gérard Brasseur recommends the 1977 Martinique volume of the Atlas of French Overseas Departments, produced by Bordeaux’s Centre d’études de géographie tropicale with a team of thirty researchers. He praises its design, shared with the Réunion volume, and the quality of its information on the natural environment. He highlights L. Elisabeth’s substantial historical account of institutions, settlement and population changes, illegitimacy, and social struggles, alongside historical data in sections on population, landholding, sugar cane, and other crops. He regrets the absence of a place-name index and the restriction of historical cartography to a single 1734 map, while admiring that map’s evocative detail and noting the limits of its place names as statistical evidence.