1. Saint-Domingue: The Richest Colony

On 1 January 1804, in the town of Gonaïves, a general who had been born into slavery declared the independence of a new nation. It was the first country in the Americas to abolish slavery permanently, the first modern state founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery, and only the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere after the United States. Its name was Haiti. To understand how it came to be, we begin with the colony it replaced.

Hispaniola

Christopher Columbus reached the island of Hispaniola in 1492. Its Indigenous people, the Taíno, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. Within a few decades, Spanish conquest, forced labor and European diseases had nearly destroyed the Taíno population. Spain began importing enslaved Africans to replace their labor. Spanish settlement concentrated in the east of the island. In the seventeenth century, French buccaneers and settlers moved into the sparsely populated west, and in 1697 Spain recognized French control of the western third of Hispaniola. The French called it Saint-Domingue.

Sugar and coffee

Over the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue became the most profitable colony in the world. Its plantations produced sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton for European markets. By common estimates, on the eve of the French Revolution it supplied around 40 percent of the sugar and 60 percent of the coffee consumed in Europe. The wealth of French port cities such as Bordeaux and Nantes depended heavily on its trade.

A society built on slavery

That wealth was produced by enslaved people. By 1789 Saint-Domingue had roughly half a million enslaved people, about 30,000 to 40,000 white colonists, and some 28,000 free people of color. Enslaved people outnumbered free people by roughly ten to one.

Conditions on sugar plantations were among the most brutal anywhere. Work in the fields and sugar mills was exhausting and dangerous, punishment was savage, and disease spread quickly. Deaths so outnumbered births that the colony depended on a constant flow of new captives. In the late 1780s, ships brought tens of thousands of enslaved Africans each year, so that by 1789 a majority of the enslaved had been born in Africa, many from West and Central Africa. They brought languages, religious traditions and, in some cases, military experience from wars in Africa, all of which would matter in the revolution.

The Code Noir

Slavery in French colonies was regulated by the Code Noir, a royal decree of 1685 under Louis XIV. It defined enslaved people as property, required their baptism as Catholics, and set rules for punishment and food. On paper it limited some abuses, but its protections were rarely enforced, and planters often ignored it.

Ranks among the free

Free society was divided too. The wealthy planters, known as the grands blancs, dominated the colony's economy. Poorer white people, the petits blancs, worked as artisans, overseers, sailors and shopkeepers, and often resented both the rich planters and free people of color.

The free people of color, many of mixed African and European ancestry, were a distinctive group. Some were wealthy, owning plantations and enslaved people themselves. But they faced growing legal discrimination: laws barred them from many professions, from wearing certain clothes and from holding public office. Their struggle for equal rights would light the first spark of the revolution.

Resistance before the revolution

Enslaved people resisted from the beginning. Some ran away to the mountains, becoming maroons, and formed communities beyond planters' control. In the 1750s a maroon leader named François Makandal was accused of organizing a poisoning plot against planters; he was captured and burned alive in 1758, and became a legend. Everyday resistance included slowing work, breaking tools and preserving African traditions. In Vodou, a religion that blended West and Central African beliefs with elements of Catholicism, enslaved people created communities of faith that planters could not control.

Worked example: following the money

Trace a pound of sugar from Saint-Domingue to a Paris café in 1785 and ask who gains and who pays at each step.

The field. Enslaved workers plant and cut cane under the whip. They receive nothing but minimal food and shelter, and many die within years of arrival.
The mill. Cane is crushed and boiled into sugar, dangerous work in which injuries are common.
The planter. The owner sells the sugar, often on credit from French merchants, and may live in luxury in France while managers run the plantation.
The port. Merchants in Bordeaux or Nantes ship and sell the sugar, and many of them also finance the slave ships that bring new captives.
The café. A Parisian sweetens coffee, itself grown in Saint-Domingue, perhaps while discussing new ideas about liberty and natural rights.

Every step but the first earns money. The people whose labor created the value were treated as property. Following the money in this way shows how ordinary European comforts were bound up with a system of extreme cruelty, and why the colony's defenders were so determined to keep it. It also sets up the central contradiction of the age: talk of universal rights in Paris, and slavery in the colony that paid for it.