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CHAPTER 1

A Comparative History of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue

This book is about social, political, and economic transformations in eighteenth-century Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, two extremely profitable but socially monstrous slave societies. These islands, we argue, were more than minor colonies in distant parts of the world, far removed from European consciousness and without global importance. Rather, they were Europe’s most successful plantation societies, and we examine them during the years when they were at their absolute peak, between 1740 and 1788. This study therefore chronicles the two most important (and not coincidentally the two most brutal) slave societies within the plantation complex that shaped the Atlantic World from its fourteenth-century origins to the end of slavery in Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s.

That plantation complex depended on a vibrant Atlantic slave trade, supplying large numbers of Africans to the tropical regions of the Americas, where they were coerced into producing luxury commodities originally developed in Asia for a European market. In the years between 1740 and 1788, this plantation complex—which we prefer to call the plantation machine, adopting the mechanistic metaphor common in the age—had reached an apogee of sorts in the Greater Antilles. In other words, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue came close to perfecting a form of economic organization that operated on a global scale, using specialized laborers from one continent who did not merely farm but in fact manufactured products in a second continental zone for consumers in a third. This revolutionary form of social and economic organization bears careful study, not only for how it functioned but for the social and political mechanisms that sustained it. This work provides that close-grained, empirically based investigation of the plantation machine within the social and political contexts of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica between 1748 and 1788.

We take as our starting point that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the plantation machine was the main driving force shaping most aspects of European colonization in the Atlantic World. Plantation colonies were peculiar and distinctive in that they were not based on community production opening up opportunities for trade. Rather their plantations were specialized producers that relied on exchange systems developed elsewhere, in Europe and especially in Africa. The plantation machine was quintessentially colonial, barely using local resources while depending heavily on goods from elsewhere—capital from Europe and labor from Africa. The colonies that perfected it, as did Jamaica and Saint-Domingue by the 1780s, exemplify a particular kind of colonialism that proved influential not just in the Americas but in European empires generally. Thus, this book is not just a local study of two interesting but unusual colonies on the margins of the Atlantic World. That might appear to be the case when we think of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue’s later history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when they were shriveled—if somewhat more egalitarian—versions of their former selves. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were much more important in the eighteenth century than their later global insignificance might suggest.¹

The Caribbean was the world region that exemplified more than any other the complex forces of early modern imperialism, forces that helped make colonialism a truly global phenomenon. The Caribbean was the first area in the New World to experience European imperialism and was battered by those forces for longer than anywhere else. Starting around 1500, Europeans largely eliminated the Amerindian population; they converted tropical hardwood forests into grazing and farmland; and they imposed a nightmarish system of slave labor to work this new land. These events, especially the nature of the sugar plantation system, left the West Indies as a diminished and regressive world.² But this book draws attention to another aspect of Caribbean history that at first glance seems contradictory: despite their brutal nature, indeed because of that brutality, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were central to a developing eighteenth-century Atlantic capitalism. As Abbé Raynal commented in 1770, “The labours of the colonists settled in these long-scorned islands are the sole basis of the African trade, extend the fisheries and cultivation of North America, provide advantageous outlets for the manufacture of Asia, double perhaps triple the activity of the whole of Europe. They can be regarded as the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the universe.”³

At the heart of this book is the argument that the Caribbean sugar plantation of the eighteenth century was an industrial, or at least proto-industrial, operation.⁴ Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were important in the Atlantic World because in the 1700s sugar planters there were able to maximize the scale—and the social and cultural consequences—of the “integrated” plantation model developed first in the Lesser Antilles in the 1600s. The eighteenth-century integrated sugar plantation, described below, led planters and their employees to develop new attitudes toward wealth, society, and production. Sugar plantations were among the first Western institutions to implement industrial-style production, deploying hundreds of workers factory-like in an array of complex interdependent tasks with careful attention to time. Their managers did not recognize or analyze their use of capital or time in ways that would become common in later manufacturing enterprises. Planters’ extraordinary focus on wealth meant that material success, allied to a heightened racial sensibility that elevated “whiteness” to a position of great importance, supplemented class standing as a primary basis of social standing. White colonial residents of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue developed individualistic behaviors that might be described as egalitarian if these societies had not been so heavily dependent on enslaved laborers. Facing the threat of slave rebellion, foreign attack, and this new individualism, colonial elites invented new ways to create or reinforce some sense of community. They also developed new racial legislation in the 1760s that established “whiteness” as a defining characteristic of full citizenship. Wealth was the defining feature of the two colonies. What was harder to develop was a sense of belonging—awareness by colonists that they belonged to places with a distinct social and corporate identity.

In order to understand how Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were central to the development of eighteenth-century Atlantic capitalism, we need to understand the workings of the central institution in each colony: the plantation. The “integrated” sugar plantation dominated the social and economic worlds of both Saint-Domingue and Jamaica. Sugar was not the only business in the two colonies: each possessed a diversified economy with a vibrant commercial culture, producing a variety of tropical crops unlike the small-island sugar colonies of the Lesser Antilles such as the British colonies of Barbados and Antigua and the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Saint-Domingue especially produced a range of other plantation commodities, most notably coffee. But sugar was central to colonial culture. It employed more workers, and generated more profits, than any other crop on either island. A sugar plantation required more land, labor, and technology than any other type of enterprise in the Caribbean. Moreover, white people in both colonies regarded sugar planters as the social elite. In 1746 Jamaica had 455 sugar estates, and in 1753 Saint-Domingue had 556.⁵

An “integrated” sugar plantation is one that not only grows sugarcanes but also transforms them into sugar crystals. Until roughly the middle of the seventeenth century, sugar production in Europe’s Atlantic colonies was often split between cane growers and sugar manufacturers. This was especially true in northern Brazil, where mills in the 1600s produced three to six times as much sugar as their equivalents in the Atlantic colonies of Madeira and Sao Tomé or on the Spanish Caribbean islands of Cuba and Santo Domingo.⁶ Specialization allowed Brazilian sugar makers to solve technical problems, for example, adopting a vertical crushing mill in place of the inefficient horizontal millstones used by Mediterranean sugar makers.⁷

Brazilian methods, including the split between cane farmers and refiners, shaped how English and French colonists began making sugar in the Caribbean in the 1640s and 1650s.⁸ Up to the 1670s, Barbados and Martinique sugar estates were unlikely to have their own mills.⁹ It took some forty years before cane growers on these two islands began to build their own sugar works. A hurricane in 1676 hastened the process in Barbados because many small and medium landowners sold their farms rather than rebuild.¹⁰ But the most important aspect of the transition to an integrated plantation model was the rise of the gang system of slave labor. In the gang system managers grouped field workers according to their physical stamina, rather than assign tasks to individual slaves. This policy allowed them to enforce the rigid cultivation schedules that mills and boiling houses required. They charged the first gang with the hardest tasks like planting or harvesting cane, for it was important that workers move through the fields at approximately the same pace, and chop harvested canes into similarly sized pieces to be fed through the mill. Planters grouped adolescents and workers past their physical prime into a second gang, used to do less difficult work, like weeding. The French word for these slave gangs—ateliers or “workshops”—illustrates the connection contemporaries saw between this new way of organizing field work and the manufacturing process. Gang labor was first mentioned in connection with Barbados in the 1650s, about the time that the first integrated plantation arose. But gang labor required dozens of workers. Planters who wanted to build gangs needed capital that would roughly equal what they spent to acquire land and build a refining operation. Sources are not clear about the rate at which planters adopted gang labor, but by the eighteenth century the system was ubiquitous on Caribbean sugar estates.¹¹

When Lesser Antilles planters integrated planting and manufacturing, and restructured their work regimes accordingly, they discovered that this approach was very profitable. An estate that successfully timed its harvest schedule to match the speed of its mill and boiling houses saved a lot of canes from rotting in its fields and mill yard. The owner of an integrated plantation could thus time the planting of his fields to keep his manufacturing operations occupied the better part of the year. As sugar makers came to participate in harvest decisions, they understood the kinds of cane juice that were sluicing into their cauldrons, whether they were from a field that gave high or low yields. A growing mastery of the details of raw materials, manufacturing constraints, and labor management produced more salable sugar. This “new plantation” model also brought significant efficiencies of scale. Larger slave forces and more land allowed planters in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue to train more slave artisans and specialists, establish livestock pens and provision grounds, and generally cut their operating costs, at least in theory. Antigua’s Samuel Martin, in the 1765 edition of his Essay upon Plantership, used the metaphor of a machine to convey the importance of regularity in plantation management. He noted that “a plantation ought to be considered as a well-constructed machine, compounded of various wheels, turning different ways, and yet all contributing to the great end proposed; but if any one part runs too fast or too slow in proportion to the rest, the main purpose is defeated.”¹² It was in these Greater Antilles colonies that the full economic, social, and cultural impact of this mode of sugar planting was expressed.

For the integrated model to work, its agricultural operations required an extraordinary degree of labor, capital investment, and attention to the passage of time. Setting aside problems that all early modern farmers faced—bad weather, plant disease, invading weeds, declining fertility, and pest incursions—planting and harvesting sugarcane was significantly more difficult than for any other early modern food crop, in terms of labor, capital equipment, and timing. Early modern sugar workers planted a field by burying thousands of sugarcane cuttings two to three feet deep into the soil. Planting or “holing” a cane field required extraordinary exertion by a team of workers. In the sugar-producing regions of the Americas these men and women were almost always enslaved and of African descent. Depending on the plant variety and the environmental conditions, these canes required roughly twelve to eighteen months to grow to maturity.

Harvesting the cane required backbreaking labor as each worker cut thousands of tall stalks several inches above the soil level and chopped each of them into three similarly sized pieces. Planters in Brazil in 1689 required their slaves to cut forty-two hundred canes per day.¹³ Heavy with juice, those canes had to be immediately hauled to a mill because they would rot in twenty-four to forty-eight hours if they were not crushed. In fact, planters often found canes rotting in the field during harvest, if they did not have enough labor or expertise to start this process at the proper moment and to complete it promptly. In addition to having a large human labor force, cane farmers needed to be keenly aware of time. They also needed teams of oxen, mules, and carts. After harvest, the root system established by the initial cutting produced more cane offshoots, known in English as “rattoons” and in French as “rejettons.” Most eighteenth-century plantations took advantage of this regrowth to reap as many as five harvests from a single planting, a method known in English as “rattooning.” Successive generations of rattooned cane, however, though they mature faster, contain progressively less sucrose.

The same three factors that shaped cane growing—time sensitivity plus access to human labor and machinery—also determined whether canes could be transformed into saleable sugar. Time is especially critical in the sugar manufacturing process and not only because hundreds of thousands of canes must be crushed one or two days after harvesting. After a mill pressed the juice from a cane, spoilage was still a danger. Early modern sugar makers boiled the sugar juice, up to the point when they could see sucrose crystals emerging from the watery solution. This evaporation stage, however, was necessarily slow, because sugar syrup caramelizes if it receives too much heat at once. To control this process, sugar makers moved the hot sugar solution through five progressively smaller cauldrons as it thickened. Once their expert touch could discern sugar crystals, sugar refiners poured the syrup into hundreds of conical clay forms. These containers sat in a dry place for four to six weeks as the remaining water drained out, in the form of a dark, sweet molasses. To make a more refined “clayed sugar” or “sucre terré,” a sugar master covered the open tops of these pots with wet clay. The clay gradually released its water into the crystals below, carrying away impurities. The resulting sugar was lighter and sold for approximately twice the price of brown sugar. The claying process also produced a larger amount of molasses, which was an additional source of profit for a planter who distilled it into rum himself or sold it to a distillery. Making sugar profitably in such conditions required that an eighteenth-century planter be an accomplished farmer and a manager of a complex manufacturing process. He needed to have access to sufficient credit to buy and replace agricultural tools. He constantly worried about making sure sugar-making supplies were available at the times when the process needed them. Most of all, he had to carefully manage a large and troublesome labor force, which, moreover, was always in a state of flux, as sugar workers were frequently unhealthy or dying, consumed by an estate’s hard-driving operating schedule. In both societies, slave numbers were maintained only by frequent purchases of new slaves, usually direct from West or West Central Africa.

To an extent, these sugar plantations were “factories in the field.” Scholars have pointed out a number of characteristics that disqualify eighteenth-century sugar estates from being labeled Europe’s first “industrial” producers.¹⁴ Yet by the second half of the eighteenth century, these nonindustrial characteristics were fading. One key argument against a plantation being akin to an industrial enterprise is that eighteenth-century planters with their slave forces viewed labor as a fixed, not a variable cost, as factory owners did in a later period. For this reason, planters have been seen as resistant to a key aspect of the Industrial Revolution, the adoption of labor-saving technology, for example new plow designs. Planters did resist using plows to plant cane, though as chapter ten of this volume makes clear, Jamaican and especially Saint-Domingue sugar planters became increasingly interested after 1750 in technologies that could make their estates more profitable. Their lack of interest in plows stemmed from the fact that they always needed large workforces to cut the cane, so they saw no compelling reason to save labor in the planting process. Even in the early twenty-first century, workers with machetes, not machines, harvest much of the world’s sugar. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century planters used the gang system to make an enslaved cane cutter into a type of machine.¹⁵

It is true that sugar planters mostly did not deal with a free labor market, though many of them did lease “jobbing gangs” from local entrepreneurs for special tasks, like planting.¹⁶ The critical point, however, is that sugar planters saw their laborers not only as workers but as highly flexible capital investments. Slaves in these colonies were viewed both as property—capital that could be used in a variety of ways—and also as people—workers who could be forced to produce income for owners. Planters could sell them, use them as collateral, or hire them out to planters who needed additional labor. Slaves thus represented highly liquid forms of capital, as well as being people who produced income for their owners. Despite this “fixed-cost” labor situation, sugar planters’ attitude that their enslaved workers were flexible and expendable capital investments was consistent with an emerging industrial mentality. Planters’ skillful and increasingly flexible deployment of “human resources” (to give a modern term to this emerging way of seeing people in capital investment terms) demonstrated their place on the cutting edge of financial and industrial capitalism.

Why have we chosen to write about two colonies within separate imperial regimes rather than two islands under the same monarch, like Barbados and Jamaica, or Saint-Domingue and Martinique? The simple answer is that we believe the unusual place of the Caribbean within the early modern Atlantic World is best revealed when its two largest slave societies are examined side by side. Such juxtaposition highlights differences between the British and French imperial systems and cultures. But this book illustrates that more unites Jamaica and Saint-Domingue than separates them. This is less a comparative history, therefore, than a twin portrait of societies moving along parallel pathways.

The question of comparison is always a vexed one, as the twentieth-century history of New World slavery illustrates. In 1947, Frank Tannenbaum, an American scholar of Latin American history, wanted to understand why “the adventure of the Negro in the New World had been structured differently in the United States than in other parts of the hemisphere.” His conclusion—that the colonizing European culture determined the levels and nature of slavery and racism—inspired many comparative works, some of which were on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica.¹⁷ Such comparative studies have not resolved the question of whether slaves’ experience varied significantly according to the nationality of the masters. One reason is that it is difficult to find societies with similar plantation systems, at equivalent levels of demographic and economic development. The nature of a slave economy has much more influence on slaves’ lives than any imperial law or institution. A second reason is that such comparisons require precise definitions of slave “treatment.”¹⁸ To create such a definition and then research it in two different colonial systems is extraordinarily difficult. “Treatment” might consist of material considerations like access to food, clothing, and medical care, to be revealed by plantation records; it might be defined in legal terms, like protection from torture or overwork, and whether those legal protections were actually enforced; or it might involve the way slaves were treated in the wider culture, like their ability to leave slavery, maintain kin networks, or join religious communities.

Scholars may never be able to answer these types of comparative questions in a rigorous way. But direct comparison is not what interests us. Tannenbaum and those he inspired tried to show how imperial cultures shaped slave societies. An essential truth of the West Indies in this period, however, is that “geography outweighed nationality.”¹⁹ Greater Antilles colonies, like Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, shared more physical characteristics with each other than with Lesser Antilles colonies within the same empire. Barbados, for example, was the island most often linked to Jamaica in the eighteenth century; both colonies had a sugar plantation economy, a society built around slavery, and a prominent place in the British Empire. Nevertheless, there were stark differences between the two places. Barbados was physically much smaller, had a larger and more settled white population, and, most important, was the sole British sugar colony to experience natural increase in its slave population before slavery was abolished in 1834. It is as appropriate to compare Barbados with Virginia or South Carolina as it is to look at what it shared with Jamaica.²⁰ A similar argument can be made in regard to comparing Martinique to Saint-Domingue. This Lesser Antilles colony was less than one-twentieth the size of Saint-Domingue and after 1750 no longer received significant numbers of European or African newcomers. The two colonies were thus very different from each other.

Jamaica and Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century resembled each other in being societies in which economic success for the few was matched by grotesque poverty for the majority. Both islands were charnel houses in which neither the white nor black population was demographically self-sustaining. Consequently, on both islands the population structure was peculiarly skewed toward recent migrants from either Africa or Europe. Adults between twenty and forty years old were a disproportionate presence while young and old people were comparatively absent. White men greatly outnumbered white women, but the great majority of the population was of African descent. Culturally, these colonies were extensions of Africa in the New World, despite whites’ political and social control. The men and women who flourished in these places were profoundly shaped by the experience of death. European visitors were either horrified or exhilarated by colonists’ lack of restraint, moderation, and deference. Saint-Domingue may have been French, and Jamaica may have been British, but they were remarkably similar in cultural terms, as observers to both societies noted.

In 1733 the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Le Pers described Saint-Domingue’s creoles (native-born whites) as differing markedly from the metropolitan French in personality and even in physique. He noted that “They are commonly well-built and easy going, though somewhat flighty and inconstant. They are frank, energetic, proud, haughty, presumptuous, [and] intrepid; in religious matters they are criticized for having very little aptitude and much indulgence but we have seen that a good upbringing easily corrects most of their faults.”²¹ At the end of the century, Moreau de Saint-Méry described Saint-Domingue’s island-born whites as having “a host of admirable qualities; frank, good natured, generous, perhaps ostentatiously, confident, brave, steadfast friends and good fathers, they are exempt from the crimes that degrade humanity.”²² Both writers identified hospitality as the principal virtue of Saint-Domingue whites.

These descriptions were strikingly similar to the portrait of the Jamaican planter made by Edward Long, the foremost mid-eighteenth-century historian of Jamaica. Long’s Jamaican planters were “of quick apprehension, brave, good-natured, affable, generous, temperate, and sober … lovers of freedom … tender fathers, humane and indulgent masters, firm and sincere friends.” They were notorious for their abundant hospitality, to friends and strangers alike, and celebrated for their devotion to “gaiety and diversions.” It is an attractive portrait. Even planter faults—Long declared them indulgent, heavy drinkers, poor economists, notoriously fickle and desultory in their pursuits, and addicted to both venery and also conspicuous consumption—point them out as agreeable companions. The faults and virtues that Long discerned in white women in Jamaica—their fidelity, good looks, chastity, modesty, and fondness of dancing, music, and other female genteel pursuits being virtues, and their overindulgence of children, ignorance and lack of education, and over familiarity with enslaved female domestics being principal defects—were similarly echoed by propagandists in Saint-Domingue.²³

Long and Moreau were, of course, determined to put a positive spin on the character of white settlers on the two islands. But less favorable modern accounts also suggest that the similarities between Frenchmen and Britons in the tropics were more significant than the differences. The brutality of the Jamaican slave overseer Thomas Thistlewood, whose life can be chronicled in some detail, is matched by the savagery toward enslaved people of Nicholas Lejeune in Saint-Domingue, whose defiant defense of his inexcusable behavior toward slave women, examined in Chapter 10, laid bare the absolute power of white masters on Caribbean sugar plantations. The psychologies of such men were shaped by the nature of the societies in which they lived. Underneath the surface shimmer of civil institutions, routinized hospitality, and the languid sensuality of colonial life, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were societies at war. A free population that was outnumbered ten to one by enslaved people had to establish its authority through arbitrary and brutal measures. The ethos of these societies was a peculiar combination of libertinism and authoritarianism, in which the authority of masters over slaves was frequently greater than the power of the imperial state and its legal institutions. Oppressors and victims lived in uneasy tension, which on occasion exploded into open and violent resistance, as in Tacky’s 1760 revolt in Jamaica, and in the hysteria surrounding the poisoning campaign allegedly undertaken by the escapee Macandal in 1757 in Saint-Domingue. Just as hurricanes, the most feared feature of the West Indian environment, could destroy everything in their path, so too the white colonists of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue lived on the edge of a social hurricane. Slave revolts could be as deadly in their implications for white society as hurricanes were for the physical landscape.

Comparative history has not been a feature of scholarship on the Caribbean since the 1980s, but a couple of important lessons emerged from those earlier works. One is the danger of writing a comparative study without a deep immersion in the archives, which in practical terms makes coauthorship necessary. The material conditions of plantation life, in particular the mortality rates of enslaved workers, show a similarity among sugar plantation colonies that overrides many of the apparent legal and cultural differences.²⁴ Political, religious, legal, and other cultural differences shaped the lives of enslaved and free people, but we cannot reliably judge those influences until we understand the material conditions of transportation, nutrition, work, and illness. For this reason a comparison of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica helps us understand how geography constrained and liberated development on both islands and meant that there would always be significant differences between them. These differences will emerge several times in this joint portrait.

Saint-Domingue and Jamaica occupied similar positions within their respective empires because of the way each was different from older Lesser Antilles colonies. English planters developed the integrated plantation model in the 1660s in Barbados. It spread gradually to French Martinique, where planters adapted it as the principal mode of social and economic organization. But the amount of land available in the Greater Antilles provided the optimal scale for eighteenth-century sugar technology. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were each twenty-five times the size of Barbados and Martinique, respectively, the Lesser Antilles colonies to which they were most frequently compared. These smaller islands are located where the Atlantic trade winds enter the Caribbean Sea, so for sailing ships they were closer to Europe and Africa than Jamaica or Saint-Domingue. The location of the Greater Antilles, however, gave them easier communication with the North American mainland. Within their respective empires, the two Greater Antilles colonies developed considerably later than their smaller counterparts. By the early 1670s, Barbados was as settled as southern England. Governor Sir Jonathan Atkins declared that “there was not a foot of land in Barbados that is not employed even to the very seaside.” Visitors thought that it looked like one continuous green garden.²⁵ By contrast, Jamaica in this period was barely inhabited. French Martinique, founded in 1635, had definitively shifted to sugar by 1669, when two-thirds of all arable land was owned by sugar planters.²⁶ Saint-Domingue’s sugar “take-off” occurred only between 1715 and 1748. At the turn of the seventeenth century, when Barbados and Martinique were looking like fully settled islands, Saint-Domingue was still mostly a wilderness.

Despite these similarities in geography and in settlement patterns, there were important differences in the physical geography and economic chronology of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Modern Haiti, whose borders somewhat exceed those of Saint-Domingue, is roughly two and a half times larger than Jamaica, with a total surface area of 10,714 square miles (27,750 square kilometers) compared to 4,213 square miles (10,911 square kilometers). Both land areas are part of a common limestone formation that makes up the Greater Antilles from Cuba into Puerto Rico. Both therefore have high and rugged interiors that were difficult for eighteenth-century cartographers to depict. In a 1763 map of Jamaica drawn by Thomas Craskell and James Simpson, the island’s chief engineer and chief surveyor created a detailed image of the colony that would not be surpassed until 1804. They depicted the island’s recently settled western highlands as far more forbidding terrain than the Blue Mountains in the long-settled eastern parishes.²⁷ In fact the Blue Mountains are Jamaica’s only true mountain range, with elevations reaching 7,402 feet (2,256 meters). Much of the rest of the interior is a rugged and elevated limestone plateau, with peaks as high as 2,770 feet (844 meters).²⁸

Cartographers were even less prepared to portray Saint-Domingue’s terrain. The Pic de la Selle, at 8,793 feet above sea level (2,680 meters), is 15 percent taller than Jamaica’s highest point. This mountain is only the highest of a complex collection of mountain systems, composed of many different ranges that divide the country into at least four distinctive regions.²⁹ By the 1760s, French mapmakers were technically able to measure these heights and to depict them in two dimensions. Most published maps of Saint-Domingue, however, either relied on older symbolic depictions of mountains, or offered topographic detail only in specific regions, as in the case of a 1776 map created to accompany a memorandum by Charles d’Estaing, a former governor.³⁰ Only in the twentieth century would Haiti’s topography be fully mapped.

Because of their mountainous interiors, in both colonies maritime transportation from one region to another was often easier than overland travel. The 1763 Craskell/Simpson map of Jamaica shows far more attention to plantations and to anchorage points than to the road network. Saint-Domingue’s maps, like one drawn in 1722 by Guillaume Delisle, show roads more clearly, but because these images contained only vague topographical detail they exaggerate the ease of overland travel.³¹ Only about 14 percent of Jamaica is level land, some of it in alluvial plains, the largest of which lie along the southern coast. The remainder is found in valleys enclosed by the central limestone plateaus. As late as the 1930s, geographers considered only 10 percent of the island to be arable.³² In modern Haiti, similarly, experts conclude that only one-fifth of land is appropriate for farming.³³

Jamaica’s geography, despite the challenges it posed to colonists, allowed a greater commercial and administrative centralization than was possible in Saint-Domingue. By the early eighteenth century the parishes of Kingston and St. Catherine, on the island’s eastern leeward side, had emerged as the colony’s political and mercantile center. The political capital at Spanish Town, the commercial center in Kingston, and smuggling and pirate town of Port Royal were all located within a twenty-mile radius. Saint-Domingue’s size, unusual coastline, and mountainous interior prevented such coherence. The most important commercial port, Cap Français, on the Atlantic coast, was so vulnerable to attack that French administrators created a series of capitals on the western coast. In the 1750s they finally settled on Port-au-Prince. Like Jamaica’s Spanish Town, this served as the official residence of the governor-general and the meeting place of the Superior Council of Port-au-Prince. Cap Français was so far away that it had its own Superior Council, and its own provincial governor. The colony’s southern coast also had its own governor, though never a Council. In terms of communication and administration, therefore, Saint-Domingue was “three colonies in one.”³⁴

Saint-Domingue’s dispersed and divided terrain made it more economically diverse than the English island. By the 1720s sugar was firmly established as the dominant product of Jamaican agriculture. As the 1763 Craskell/Simpson map shows, colonists there also planted cacao, ginger, cotton, and pimentos and raised livestock. No other crop, however, rivaled sugar for export earnings, capital investment, or enslaved labor. In Saint-Domingue, where sugar planting was slower to emerge, many planters produced indigo or cotton. Coffee, introduced from Martinique in the 1730s, came to rival sugar by the 1760s as a Dominguan export. It could be grown in the interior mountains, which were useless for sugar, and it required a far smaller investment in labor, animals, and machinery.

Physical and geopolitical conditions in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue meant that both territories sheltered what Franklin Knight dubbed “transfrontier” populations even before the English and French took power.³⁵ Spanish colonists bought enslaved Africans early in the 1500s, and by the mid-seventeenth century, communities of escaped black men and women—maroons—were already living in the mountain interiors of both colonies. In Jamaica, newly imported Africans joined the former slaves of the Spanish so that by the 1730s the island had about one thousand maroons.³⁶ They fought the British throughout the 1730s, winning treaties in 1738 and 1739 that recognized their right to exist in the interior and to govern themselves. Spanish Santo Domingo had more maroons than white settlers in 1542, and maroon villages remained in place in much of the island in the mid-1600s as the French established themselves in the western third.³⁷ From the 1720s through to the 1740s, French colonists in Saint-Domingue fought maroon bands in the mountains. In the 1750s some observers estimated that the colony had three thousand maroons.³⁸ Saint-Domingue, perhaps because of its larger size and the distance between its mountain regions, never had a maroon war like that of Jamaica. By 1785, Saint-Domingue had only one large maroon population, the Le Maniel maroons, who were living on the southernmost part of the French-Spanish colonial border when they signed a treaty with the French.

Although the English and French established their claims differently on the two colonies, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue started with a significant number of inhabitants who might be described as white maroons—escaped sailors and indentured servants seeking freedom. An English fleet attacked and conquered Spanish Jamaica in 1655, after failing to take Santo Domingo. The island quickly became a major center for smuggling and piracy. France claimed Saint-Domingue earlier but less forcefully. In the 1640s, French authorities in the Lesser Antilles began sending governors to the western third of Hispaniola, which the Spanish had forcibly evacuated in 1605. Officials of the royally chartered companies that administered this frontier territory in the seventeenth century gradually claimed control over the population of castaways, escapees, and deserters who lived here hunting feral cattle, farming tobacco, and attacking passing ships. Company governors brought in new colonists from the metropole as well as from the Lesser Antilles. The French navy, with fewer sailors and ships than the English, allied with these pirates in the 1680s and 1690s for raids on the Spanish mainland and even on Jamaica in 1694, carrying away many slaves. English forces out of Jamaica attacked the French colony the following year.

Even with the growth of sugar, Jamaica remained a major commercial center for illegal trade with Spanish colonies, especially the transshipment of enslaved Africans. In 1700 the prospect of placing a Bourbon monarch on the Spanish throne led French authorities to imagine that Saint-Domingue could take over Jamaica’s role as commercial gateway to Spanish American market. But over a twenty-year period a French monopoly company charged with this task failed to dislodge the English from this trade. As French colonists noted, their kingdom’s slave trade could not supply enough workers even to them, let alone to the Spanish. Throughout the eighteenth century, England’s naval superiority to France and the far greater volume of its African trade, at least until the 1780s, when slave imports to Saint-Domingue far surpassed that of Jamaica, would be two essential points of difference between Saint-Domingue and Jamaica.³⁹

Another essential difference between the two colonies was the way in which their empires’ respective mercantile policies were configured. England’s Navigation Acts, passed in 1651, were designed to reclaim shipping and commerce among English colonies and the metropole from Dutch shippers. Both England and France initially formed joint-stock companies, which received royal monopolies on trade with certain geographical regions, like, for example, England’s Royal African Company (1660–1752), or France’s Company of the West Indies (1664–74) or the French Company of the Indies (1719–69), all loosely modeled on the Dutch West Indies Company. Both kingdoms asserted a national monopoly on trade with their colonies, including the all-important commerce in captive Africans bound for the sugar fields. In the 1720s and 1730s, both kingdoms opened up the African and West Indian trades, eventually allowing any subject to participate. The national monopoly, however, remained in place.

In general, metropolitan officials believed their closed colonial trade systems were essential to their kingdom’s international strength. Nevertheless, French colonists in Saint-Domingue (far more than their counterparts in Jamaica) came to see this mercantilist system as a major obstacle to economic development. Jamaica benefited from the strength of English commercial shipping. Its proximity to the British North American mainland allowed its colonists to legally trade food, timber, animals, fish, and other supplies from the north for tropical commodities. In 1733 England prohibited its West Indian colonists from refining sugar on their plantations, in order to protect the profits of metropolitan sugar refiners, which meant that planters could export only muscovado. This brown sugar was worth far less per pound than semirefined white and golden varieties. English monopoly law, however, prevented metropolitan consumers from buying cheaper foreign sweeteners. In this way mercantilism guaranteed a higher price for West Indian sugars in Britain than could be found in Continental European markets.⁴⁰

Saint-Domingue’s planters had to sell to France, which reexported about half of all colonial products to other continental ports, especially ports in the North Sea. The French colonial monopoly did not protect sugar prices, but by the middle of the eighteenth century it allowed colonists to refine their product from muscovado or brown sugar to a more valuable clayed or golden sugar. French planters complained they were poorly served by French commerce. The difficulty of travel between French Canada and the Antilles meant that French colonists mostly had to import provisions from France, at a much higher cost than if they could have come legally from ports like Philadelphia or New York. Smuggling was widely practiced in Saint-Domingue, where colonists sold sugar but also cotton and indigo to English captains from Jamaica and North America. The weak supply of African slaves from French slavers was also a special grievance for Saint-Domingue planters.

Just as France and Britain operated under different political conditions during the eighteenth century, so too their colonies were governed in quite separate ways. Jamaica had a much greater degree of self-governing autonomy than did Saint-Domingue, even though London often fought this tendency.⁴¹ By comparison with Saint-Domingue, gubernatorial authority was comparatively weak. Governors did not control the money supply, or at least did not do so very effectively, even after 1726, when the Assembly agreed to a perpetual tax supporting the government. Jamaica’s governors had to continuously negotiate with an Assembly elected by the island’s planter class. This body saw itself as the functional equivalent of Parliament, able to make laws as its members saw fit.

What this meant, in short, was that Jamaican planters and merchants were prepared to exercise local authority based on what they believed were their immutable rights as freeborn Englishmen. In the mid-1760s, for example, in an extensive controversy between the Assembly and the governor, Nicholas Bourke defended Jamaicans as “men zealous for the constitution and liberties of their country” against the governor’s supposed support for “the absurd and slavish Doctrines of DIVINE and HEREDITARY RIGHT and PASSIVE OBEDIENCE and NON-RESISTANCE.”⁴²

Saint-Domingue, in contrast, had no such legislative body where patriotic colonists could voice their discontent. All laws came from the colony’s governor-general and often from the Naval Ministry at Versailles. To the extent that the colonial elite had a voice in the government, this voice came from connections to judges sitting on one of two Superior Councils in Port-au-Prince and Cap Français. These bodies began in the seventeenth century as councils of leading planters, but by the eighteenth century they had become formal courts of law, modeled on France’s thirteen regional parlements. Judges were appointed by the Crown and had to have legal training that was available only in France. These Councils were courts of appeal, but, like metropolitan parlements, they had the ceremonial right to register all laws, giving them legal standing. In France’s absolutist tradition, they did not have the right to deny registration, or even to voice complaints about these new laws. But in reality, the Councils saw themselves as representing or protecting the colony against the excesses and errors of royal administrators.

One important way in which Jamaicans exercised their “zealous” regard for their inherited rights as Englishmen was in insisting on almost absolute control—a tyrant’s charter, in fact—over how they treated their enslaved population. There were effectively no constraints in Jamaica limiting slave owners’ behavior toward enslaved people. Saint-Domingue, in contrast, had a comprehensive slave law, the Code Noir of 1685, which theoretically governed relations between slaves and masters in the French colonies. In practice, however, the Code Noir was rarely used to punish masters. Throughout the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue’s planters claimed the right to control and punish slaves as they saw fit. In many ways, the attitudes and claims of Saint-Domingue’s planters resembled those of their Jamaican counterparts, as this book will demonstrate.

The varying geographies of the two colonies; the nature of settlement, commerce, and migration; and, most important, the different configurations of imperial governance made differences between the two islands significant. Yet the similarities were also profound. One major similarity was how each society developed new racial classificatory systems following France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War and Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760. These events were sufficiently traumatic for white colonists to abandon their previous social definition of race in favor of a racism that prefigured the explicitly biological racism of nineteenth-century imperialism. “Whiteness” became more important: “passing” from black to white became more difficult as the state required more documentation from people of mixed ancestry and as new laws restricted their wealth and demeaned their social status. Both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue transformed themselves from places that had a degree of fluidity in their social hierarchies to societies with an almost caste-like racial rigidity. This subjugation of people of color lingered in history for a long time, influencing colonial attitudes to race in places as diverse as nineteenth-century Australasia and South Africa and twentieth-century Southeast Asia.⁴³

We do not claim that Jamaican and Saint-Domingue colonists invented racism. The construction of race is a complex matter, especially in a period where old and new ideas of social identity mixed uneasily. As we explain in Chapters 6 and 7, colonists’ efforts to define who was “white” and who was not arose from short-term political needs as much as from beliefs that blacks were racially inferior. Nevertheless, the emergence of a heightened legal and social awareness of “whiteness” in Jamaica from the 1760s and in Saint-Domingue in the 1770s was an important step in the wider history of race and Atlantic capitalism.⁴⁴ Before the Seven Years’ War, a literate, nominally Christian man or woman who had freedom, wealth, and connections to a prominent colonial family was considered a member of the colonial elite. By the 1760s and 1770s, however, both societies came to embrace the idea that “whiteness” was more important than mere freedom, or even wealth, in determining social and political position.

In this twin portrait, we are conscious that while the historical trajectories of the two colonies merged together at times, in the end the historical experience of the two places led to different futures. Jamaica flourished during the twenty five years that followed Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War. But Saint-Domingue experienced an even greater transformation, catapulting it above Jamaica in wealth and imperial importance. The British may have won the war in the Greater Antilles but the French most definitely won the peace. As the fourth chapter of this book details, the irony of the Seven Years’ War was that the long term result of the conflict, in the Caribbean as much as in North America, was that the winner (Britain) lost while the loser (France) triumphed. By allowing France to rebuild in the Caribbean after the Seven Years’ War, Britain threw away the advantages it had gained for itself in its victories of the late 1750s and early 1760s. But another irony lurked in French recovery after 1763. Saint-Domingue became too successful for its own good. Whether the growth of Saint-Domingue would have continued if the French Revolution had not occurred is the subject of debate.⁴⁵ What is undeniable, however, is that the consequences of metropolitan and internal challenges to white planter dominance in the 1790s were more dramatic than in Jamaica. Saint-Domingue became Haiti by the early nineteenth century. It was by then a radically different place than before. Jamaica remained Jamaica, even if diminished in wealth and importance.⁴⁶ What we hope readers will gain from the twinned histories of these two eighteenth-century colonies is that Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were at the forefront of social, economic, and political development in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. How they developed, and how they prospered, in the period between the Seven Years’ War and the start of the French Revolution was not incidental but central to the nature of French and British imperialism in the New World and in imperial settings generally.

This introduction has outlined the major themes we explore in this work. But it might be worth briefly outlining the plan of what follows. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 set out the background necessary to understand the peculiar societies of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, places that seem as strange to modern readers as they were to European contemporaries. These chapters describe the most salient features of each society, focusing on the plantation and the town. They provide some glimpses into what colonists experienced and what Africans suffered in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue during the period of the Seven Years’ War.

The narrative section of the book focuses around the three great global wars that transformed the Caribbean in the second half of the eighteenth century. Chapter 4 provides a Caribbean-focused narrative of the Seven Years’ War, which is key to our argument in the book’s most important section, Chapters 5, 6, and 7. These chapters describe the new legal definitions of “whiteness” formulated in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. In the book’s third and final section, Chapters 8, 9, and 10, we describe the results of this transformation in racial thinking and document how the American Revolutionary War shaped life for white colonists and by extension their enslaved property. We conclude just before the start of the final and most momentous global war in the second half of the eighteenth century. This war, lasting from 1789 through to 1815, was occasioned by the French Revolutions and led to the most significant turbulence in the French Antilles since the Columbian Encounter of the early sixteenth century. But when we end, in 1788, that turbulence was ahead of colonists in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue and was largely unimaginable to anyone living in either place.

Every writer thinks his or her topic of enquiry is especially important. We are no different. We believe that if you are to understand the making of the modern world in the crucial years encompassing the various political and economic revolutions (American, French, Haitian, and Industrial) that transformed Western and then global society in the second half of the eighteenth century, then what happened in Saint-Domingue and Jamaica between 1748 and 1788 cannot be ignored. They were examples of success in the modern world, in that the plantation machine was a fundamental step forward in the organization of labor for the enrichment of the fortunate owners of large-scale enterprises. The plantation was a great success because it was a precursor to the industrial factory in its management of labor, its harvesting of resources, and its scale of capital investment and output.⁴⁷ As the preceding quote from Abbé Raynal illustrates, contemporaries were well aware of how the economic potential of the plantation system, including its methods of management and economic organization, made places like Jamaica and Saint-Domingue extremely valuable imperial possessions. They were also geopolitically significant, and imperial officials devoted large resources to defending them. In the American Revolution, for example, keeping Jamaica safe from French attack was so important that Britain compromised the defense of its American mainland possessions by withdrawing its navy from the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 in order to send it southward. Saint-Domingue was even more important geopolitically to France, as shown by its expenditure of vast amounts of money and huge reserves of well-trained European soldiers during the calamitous (for the French, anyway) Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804 in an ultimately fruitless campaign to restore slavery and the plantation system in its former Greater Antillean “jewel.”⁴⁸ Haitians remembered how they had humiliated the French. One of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s officers attended patriotic plays celebrating Haitian independence wearing a large hat on which was written, in large red letters, “Haiti, the tomb of the French.” The French remembered their humiliation also, inflicting on Haiti in 1825 an enormous and crippling indemnity of 150 million francs for the privilege of engaging in international trade.⁴⁹

The significance of these remarkably successful and terrifyingly brutal slave societies is increasingly recognized in an Atlantic-inflected historiography in which Jamaica and Saint-Domingue are seen not just as important within Caribbean and American history but as vital parts of eighteenth-century British and French imperial history. As authors with a long-standing interest in the history of the Greater Antilles, we have watched how over the last twenty years the history of this part of the world and the story of the plantation machine has moved from the margins of historical interest to become a more central component of the story of how the modern world came into being.⁵⁰ We believe that our cautious approach to the importance of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue to French and British social, political, and economic development in the second half of the eighteenth century allows for a defensible appreciation of the links between Caribbean slavery and European industrialism. Wealth from Jamaica proved beneficial to Britain, enhancing manufacturing and urbanization, and providing an impetus to Britain’s powerful mercantile class. So too wealth from Saint-Domingue helped move French eighteenth-century merchant capitalism toward industrialism, though the American and French Revolutions delayed and shaped this process.⁵¹ Exports from Britain to the Americas made a powerful contribution to British economic growth, although the most significant area to contribute to British wealth was not West Indian slave societies as much as the northern mainland colonies in which growing European populations stimulated demand for British manufactures.⁵² In the absence of slave colonies, the northern colonies may still have imported similar quantities of British manufactures, but the existence of places like Jamaica allowed northern merchants to acquire the finance necessary to buy British goods through money gained in trade with West Indian colonies.

The wealth derived from Jamaica was significant in other ways. A few Jamaican politicians, notably William Beckford II, who was an intimate of William Pitt the elder, were able to influence British politics in respect to the governance of Atlantic colonies.⁵³ But Jamaica was most important to Britain as a source of wealth and prestige for a substantial portion of Britain’s ruling elite and as an incubator of culturally important institutions that helped define Britain as a nation. Jamaican money and Jamaican planters who were resident in Britain, especially in southeastern England, altered consumption patterns and changed cultural practices, particularly in regard to house building, connoisseurship, and philanthropy.⁵⁴ In addition, the enslaved and free people of color that Jamaicans brought with them into Britain altered irrevocably, as we discuss in later chapters of this book, the character of British race relations, just as they also did in France. Indeed, Britons’ self-conception of themselves as modern people, living in diverse societies, hinged, as Kathleen Wilson has argued, on a developing historical consciousness shaped by contact and exchange in the metropolis between Britons and people of African descent brought in by Jamaican planters.⁵⁵

Less work has been done on the contribution of planters in the French Caribbean to France in the late eighteenth century, with Atlantic history relatively marginalized within French historiography. Moreover, the collapse of Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution has tended to hide the dynamic influence of wealthy planters in French commerce and social life prior to the French Revolution.⁵⁶ But some recent work has shown that, as in Britain, the wealth of the Antilles in the second half of the eighteenth century penetrated into the highest reaches of French society, notably in the port towns of Bordeaux and Nantes and into the financial and political capital of Paris. French metropolitan investment in the Antilles was even more extensive than in Britain, with large merchant houses such as the Chaurands in Nantes investing 3 million livres tournois into West Indian planters.⁵⁷ They were backed up by leading Parisian banks, which saw investment in Saint-Domingue as potentially lucrative. Caribbean planters made a sizeable contribution to France, with imperial products amounting to as much as 15 percent of overall economic growth in France during the expansionary years between 1716 and 1787.⁵⁸ Much of this money ended up in Paris, which in the eighteenth century was transformed from an administrative and manufacturing city into a financial powerhouse. Money flooded into the capital from everywhere in France and also from Saint-Domingue. For example, in the 1770s, Jean-Joseph de Laborde, the wealthiest man in France, invested heavily in Saint-Domingue, after retiring from court finance and rebuilding the La Grange-Batelière district of Paris into a stylish quartier. Laborde spent 1.2 million livres to acquire a collection of contiguous plantations, and 750,000 livres as his share of a complex irrigation system in the region. He populated his estates with thousands of captives, many of whom traveled from Africa on his slave ships. By 1789 his estates had fourteen hundred enslaved workers.⁵⁹

As the French metropolis became increasingly indebted after the American Revolution, its economic reliance on Saint-Domingue deepened and intensified. Allan Potofsky has detailed how Jean-Baptiste Hotten (1741–1802) used his profits from his large sugar estate with 219 enslaved laborers to become a Parisian real estate mogul. The son of a Bordelais sugar merchant, Hotten was unusual in carrying little debt at a time when private and public debt was spiraling out of control. This strong financial position allowed him to splurge on Paris real estate, constructing an elaborate complex in northwest Paris, consisting of a hôtel particulier, rental homes, and a large private garden. Interestingly, he continued his purchases well into the 1790s, showing that Caribbean planters were not left as destitute by the Haitian Revolution as they pretended.⁶⁰

Hotten’s prosperity in France, at least until he died violently during an ill-advised return to the colony, shows that we should not base our judgments about late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue on Haiti’s later history. We know what contemporaries did not, namely that in a few short years after the late 1780s Saint-Domingue society would explode into the revolutionary conflagration that led to the creation of the first independent nation in the Western Hemisphere led by people of African ancestry. The situation in Jamaica in the late 1780s and 1790s was not so dramatic. Indeed, the destruction of Saint-Domingue proved a boon to Jamaica, which profited from the economic vacuum created by the Haitian Revolution. In the 1790s it enjoyed a prolonged if unsustainable boom in sugar production and slave importation that few would have predicted a decade previously. But Jamaica faced long-term problems after the 1780s, mostly initiated from actions taken in the metropolis, all of which were designed, in the minds of proslavery Jamaicans, to undermine an immensely productive plantation system. They thought it “madness.”⁶¹ Unlike Saint-Domingue, Jamaica’s slide from great wealth and geopolitical importance happened gradually, occasioned by the growing power of a force that Jamaican planters barely recognized before 1788—abolitionists campaigning for the end of the slave trade and, by the 1820s, for the abolition of slavery itself.

We ask readers to try and forget what they know is going to happen to these two colonies. After 1788 each confronted an unusual combination of outside events and revolutionary movements that transformed not just the Greater Antilles but also the Atlantic World. To describe these transformations is beyond the scope of this book. But we will show that in 1788 neither Jamaica nor Saint-Domingue were disasters waiting to happen, as an earlier generation of historians suggested. Rather, they were remarkable economic successes and considerable contributors to imperial wealth in the dramatic years between the start of the Seven Years’ War and the calling of the French Estates General in 1788. In Jamaica, the travails of the American Revolutionary years and the multiple hurricanes that afflicted the island from 1780 to 1786 had ended by 1788. The slave trade had started to flow again; plantation profits were once again buoyant; and productivity gains on plantations were making slavery ever more efficient, but just as deadly to workers as before. Britain remained strongly committed to Jamaica as the centerpiece of its British Atlantic strategy. By any standard except one Jamaica was doing very well.⁶² The exceptional standard was Saint-Domingue. By 1788, Saint-Domingue’s culture of relentless slave exploitation and highly capitalized agro-industry had been bolstered by a doubling and tripling of the French trade in African slaves, making it the most valuable colonial territory on earth.

The French government, even more than the British government in Jamaica, recognized Saint-Domingue’s importance and devoted ever increasing resources to its protection and development. It gave beneficial terms to slave traders and spent massive sums on rebuilding its navy. The results were remarkable. Atlantic trade for the first time in French history challenged trade to the Mediterranean as the dominant sector in French commerce. But the costs of catering to the growth of Saint-Domingue were considerable. As William Doyle notes, it is not “a complete exaggeration to suggest that the costs of upholding a colonial system that could only work through slavery were what ultimately brought down the ancien régime in France.”⁶³

The remarkable economic success of these two colonies was acknowledged, eagerly welcomed, and sometimes resented in Europe because of the relentless materialism of both societies. The last point became more salient over time. Metropolitan observers increasingly felt that the white residents of these societies were morally deficient in their attachment to material gain, their indifference and sometimes hostility to traditional values, and, most of all, their shortsighted and seemingly un-European exploitation of their servile laborers. It was not the economics of slavery, but the cultural practices that were associated with the institution, that caused most concern in France and Britain. We can see these practices in a close examination of society and economy in the two colonies. We turn to this examination now.