… Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1996), p. 279-297; Dominque Rogers and Stewart King, ‘Housekeepers, merchants, rentières: free women of color in the port cities of colonial Saint-Domingue, 1750-1790’, in … helped the colonists feel connected to the Continent. Enthusiasm for theatre grew along with urban populations. Theatre houses sprang up in Cap français and Port-au-Prince in the 1740s. By the 1760s, Le Cap boasted a theatre large enough to … wrote in 1786, ‘we have only the theatre as a public meeting point.’ 15 Despite the opening of some bookstores, coffeehouses and dance halls after the 1770s, the celebrated observer of colonial life, Moreau de Saint-Méry, believed …