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As Hurricane Katrina's surge filled the bowl-shaped metropolis of New Orleans, the simple geography of rising water came face-to-face with the complex human geography of a nearly three-hundred-year-old city. Whose homes were flooded, in terms of race, ethnicity, and class, became the subject of national discussion. This article describes how those residential patterns fell into place beginning in colonial times, and how they were affected by Katrina's flood.
Historical Diversity
Travelogues testify to the extraordinary diversity of early nineteenth-century New Orleans. "No city perhaps on the globe," wrote one visitor in 1816, "presents a greater contrast of national manners, language, and complexion, than does New Orleans." Marveled another in 1835, "Truly does New-Orleans represent every other city and nation upon earth. I know of none where is congregated so great a variety of the human species." "What a hubbub!" gushed another visitor, "what an assemblage of strange faces land] distinct people!"1
That was not the case during the colonial era. The isolated port, founded in 1718, struggled with sparse population and little attention from French and Spanish colonial governments. Events around the turn of the nineteenth century transformed New Orleans from an orphaned outpost of a descending colonial power to a strategically sited port city of an ascendant New World nation. Agricultural technologies facilitated the rapid shift of its hinterland crops from tobacco and indigo in the colonial era to expansive plantations of lucrative cotton and sugarcane in the antebellum era, both of which profited New Orleans enormously. Agricultural developments also breathed new life into the institution of slavery, and New Orleans became the busiest slave market in the South. Finally, the slave insurgency in Saint Domingue, which began in 1791 and eventually expelled the French regime, diminished Napoleon Bonaparte's interest in the seemingly unpromising Louisiana colony and motivated the emperor to sell it to the United States in 1803. Authorities regularly predicted that the strategically located port of New Orleans, now under American dominion, would become the most important city in the hemisphere.2
Ethnic Geographies of Antebellum New Orleans
The ethnic geography of New Orleans circa 1800 was relatively simple. Locally born French-speaking Catholics (Creoles), from various Francophone/Hispanic regions and racial backgrounds, were spatially intermixed throughout the city, with the enslaved living in...