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CHAPTER 2

The Plantation World

Eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue and Jamaica were difficult societies for contemporaries to comprehend. Amazingly profitable and extraordinarily brutal, they were afflicted by horrific rates of disease and death, not only among enslaved peoples but also among their ruling elites. Death defined the peculiar cultural ambience of each place better than anything else.¹ Free residents seemed addicted to the fervent pursuit of pleasure as well as money in ways that fascinated but also unnerved observers coming from North America or Europe. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, for example, the author of the iconic text on American identity, Letters from an American Farmer, found Jamaica impossible to place in his schema of American development. Crèvecoeur, who appears to have visited Jamaica in the 1780s, understood the cruelties inherent in the plantation slavery that sustained societies from Virginia to northern Brazil and believed this system was deeply irrational.² Nevertheless, Jamaica disturbed him in ways that Spanish America—which he saw as lethargic, indolent, superstitious, and backward—did not. Jamaica’s essential characteristics, he thought, were restless wandering, corruption, and pervasive dishonesty.

He noted Jamaica’s “great Glare of Richesses.” He was “shocked at that perpetual Collision & Combination of Crimes & Profligacy which I observed there.” He noted the “severity Exercised agt ye Negroes” and lamented the illicit sexuality that raised some black females to a “Pomp” from “which the rest were reduced” and that was derived from “a perversion of appetites.” In a place with no religion “save few Temples,” everything was sacrificed to business and sensuality. He lamented that “a perpetual pursuit of Gain & Pleasures seem’d to be the idol of the Island.” Jamaica was “a Chaos of Men Negroes & things which made my Young American head Giddy.” Fighting his way “through this obnoxious Crowd,” the innocent narrator reflected that “the Island itself looked like a Great Gulph, perpetually absorbing Men by the power of Elementary Heat, of Intemperance by the force of every Excess” so that “Life resembled a Delirium Inspired by the warmth of the sun urging every Passion & desire to some premature Extreme.” His only response to these extremes, to the “Exhausting Climate,” and to “the perpetual struggle subsisting between the two great factions which Inhabit this Island,” was to take leave of Jamaica and not think about it again.³

Travelers to Saint-Domingue were similarly dislocated. Colonists there were highly materialistic, and had few communal institutions or spaces that were reminiscent of France. Isolated on their estates, many colonists adopted the customs of the buccaneers that preceded them and the enslaved Africans that surrounded them. It was a place that seemed at one and the same time to be very French and also the least French place imaginable. The colony inspired both desire and disgust in Alexandre-Stanislas de Wimpffen, a minor nobleman who sought his fortune there in the late 1780s. He was entranced, on the one hand, by the colonial landscape and by beautiful “mulâtresses” who “combine the explosiveness of saltpeter with an exuberance of desire, that scorning all, drives them to pursue, acquire and nourish pleasure.” But he saw Saint-Domingue as a world turned upside down, where morality was absent, mainly owing to slavery. It was a society based on pursuit of profit, not religious virtue, social cohesion, or imperial loyalty. He proclaimed, “The Commerce of France is the true owner of Saint-Domingue.”⁴ Lieutenant Colonel Desdorides, stationed in Saint-Domingue in 1779, was also struck by colonists’ pursuit of profit and pleasure. He lamented that “it seems that in Saint-Domingue violent agitations of the heart take the place of principles; except for illusions of love, dreams of pleasure, extravagances of luxury and greed, the heart knows no other adorations.”⁵ Desdorides believed that an obsession with money had fundamentally transformed the character of French colonists: “In Saint-Domingue, men and women behave in a manner totally opposed to what I have described [of the French character]. Men there reduce everything to financial gain.”⁶

In this chapter, and the next, we look at a variety of images that help us understand these places—even if they lead us to the same feelings of displacement, dislocation, and unease felt by contemporary visitors. We start by examining large-scale maps, which show the geography and diversity of environment in each colony and which also give a glimpse into some of the underlying ideologies animating the West Indian ruling elite. We proceed to a treatment of the sugar plantation (the quintessential institution in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue) through two allied but very different portraits—one an idealized pastoral scene that hides the reality of enslavement and the other an estate plan that makes abundantly clear the underlying violence of the plantation machine, as well as the luxury it allowed owners. From an extensive survey of rural life in the two colonies in Chapter 2, we move, in Chapter 3, to examine the vibrant culture of colonial towns.

In 1763, the year that the Peace of Paris confirmed Britain’s victories in the Seven Years’ War, Thomas Craskell and James Simpson published an elaborate map of Jamaica (Figure 1). Encompassing twelve sheets, it was the culmination of the first detailed survey of the whole of the island, done under the direction of Governor Henry Moore between 1756 and 1761. This map stood for the next forty years as the most detailed image of Jamaica, identifying sugar plantations, some with water mills, and some with wind and cattle mills. It also located ginger, cotton, and pimento estates, livestock pens, military barracks, principal anchorage points, and Jamaica’s road system.⁷ By the 1760s the English had been developing Jamaica for a century.⁸ Though it was roughly one-third the size of Saint-Domingue, it was much bigger than any of Britain’s Lesser Antilles islands, more geographically varied, and consequently more capable of future development. Indeed, at the start of the Seven Years’ War much good land was still uncultivated.⁹

Figure 1. “To the Right Honourable George, Earl of Halifax … This map of the island of Jamaica … humbly inscribed by Thos. Craskell, Engineer, and Jas. Simpson, Surveyor.” London: Fournier, 1763. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

Unlike the smaller colonies, Jamaica had mountains, swamps, and arid sections, as well as fertile coastal plains. This variety made it far more difficult than, say, Barbados to transform into a large-scale sugar producer. Francis Price’s attempts to establish the Worthy Park plantation in the central parish of St. Thomas in the Vale illustrate how difficult this process of agricultural transformation turned out to be. Price, who arrived in Jamaica in 1655, acquired the land soon after English settlement, but when he died in 1689 he was still relatively poor. His land was only partly cleared, and it was devoted mainly to food crops and pasture rather than sugar. Price’s farm was the sort of modest pioneer property that might have been found in the backwoods of seventeenth-century Virginia. It was Price’s grandson Charles, who died as Speaker of the House of Assembly in 1772, who transformed Worthy Park into a large plantation with hundreds of slaves and significant amounts of cane land.¹⁰ Jamaica’s slow development disappointed English imperialists. Celebrating British American growth and expansion in 1776, Adam Smith reminded his readers that a century before, “the island of Jamaica was an unwholesome desert; little inhabited and less cultivated…. The island of Barbados, in short, was the only British colony of any consequence of which the condition at the time bore any resemblance to what it is at present.”¹¹

Jamaica became the jewel of the British Empire because of the ability of its planters to extract great wealth from sugar. But the risks involved in starting a plantation were considerable. A remarkable set of planter’s records from Jamaica in the 1670s details the frustrations of the process. Cary Helyar was an aspiring but impecunious younger son from a genteel background. He came to Jamaica in the early 1660s, made some money in slave trading, and developed connections with leading politicians. He bought prime sugar land. He boasted to his brother that his Bybrook plantation of 1,236 acres was “almost square, of as good land and as well-watered as any in the island.” Yet to make sugar at Bybrook required a large capital investment in slaves, equipment, and livestock.¹² Only in the late 1680s did Bybrook generate significant profits, and those disappeared in the 1690s, after Helyar’s son, who had inherited the estate, returned to England. The Helyars could not find honest and skilled managers to supervise their overseers. Sugar production dropped, dead slaves were not replaced, and equipment wore out. By 1713, when the family sold it, the property was close to worthless. As Helyar’s experience suggests, sugar planting was a tricky business.

Figure 2. “To the Right Honourable Robert, Earl of Holdernesse, this map of the county of Cornwall, in the island of Jamaica … humbly inscribed by Thos. Craskell, Engineer, Jas. Simpson, Surveyor.” London: Fournier, 1763. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

Small planters preferred other options to the risky enterprise of large-scale planting. Piracy was one option.¹³ For ordinary white men an enjoyable life could be had roistering in the narrow streets of Port Royal, seeking fame and fortune through plundering expeditions against the Spanish. They could supplement their income and ensure a measure of landed independence by growing small quantities of crops on a few acres of land in nearby parishes. A British migrant, John Taylor, gives us a lively picture of Port Royal at its zenith. It was not only Port Royal’s “merchants and gentry” who “live here to the hights of splendor,” but “all sorts of mechanicks and tradesmen … all of which live here verey well, earning thrice the wages given in England, by which means they are enabled to maintain their famallies much better than in England, by which tradesmen ’tis much advance both in strength and wealth, still becoming more formidable.”¹⁴

Figure 3. “To the Right Honourable George Grenville, Esq., First Lord Commissioner of Surrey in the Island of Jamaica … humbly inscribed by Thos. Craskell, Engineer, Jas. Simpson, Surveyor.” London: Fournier, 1763. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

Port Royal was badly damaged in a 1692 earthquake, effectively ending privateering. Around this time, between the 1680s and the 1720s, wealthy colonists boosted their profits by adopting the integrated plantation model. A massive influx of enslaved Africans ensured that this model would be successful. While the black population was relatively equal to the white population in the 1670s, by 1700 Jamaica was populated mainly by enslaved blacks. In 1710, the Crown allowed private traders into the African slave trade previously monopolized by the Royal African Company. This greatly increased the number of captives arriving in Jamaica. Large sugar estates bought most of those Africans so that by the 1720s, most slaves lived and worked in labor forces of one hundred or more. The dominance of large plantations remained virtually unchanged until the end of slavery. Simultaneously, white servitude declined dramatically. Until the 1680s, most planters with medium to large slave forces also had indentured white servants as part of their labor force. In 1690 Dalby Thomas described a sugar plantation with fifty slaves as needing seven servants.¹⁵ From the 1690s, however, the numbers of white servants noted in inventories faded away until by the 1720s a white servant in an inventory was a rarity. By this time, land prices were soaring as the best territory in the settled parishes of the southern coast and in central Jamaica to planters had already been distributed. The hard work of slaves and servants transformed these properties into fertile sugarcane fields.

The rise of the large integrated plantation had two significant consequences for Jamaica. First, it meant that the colony’s population consisted primarily of enslaved African slaves sold to Jamaican planters to labor as sugar workers. Second, their labor produced a planter class with wealth and influence unprecedented in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Elite planters remained the dominant social and political force on the island, despite demographic disaster and metropolitan opposition, until after the end of slavery in 1838. This new plantation world was reflected in the Craskell and Simpson maps of 1763. The engraver, Daniel Fournier of London, included ornate title cartouches that showed just how far Jamaica had developed since perilous times in the 1690s and 1700s. The three scenes showed a confident planter class at work and at play. In the left-hand bottom corner, a planter posed next to an ornate stone on which the names of the governor commissioning the map and the two surveyors were engraved. A kneeling and sub-servient black man carrying pails of water accompanied the planter. Behind him was a well-ordered plantation with a working windmill, cattle trudging along a pathway, and a harbor with ships docked in the distance. Notably absent were the mass of enslaved people necessary for a functioning sugar plantation.

Counterposed to this scene of rural productivity was an urban scene in the right-hand top corner. Likely a composite picture of British West Indian ports rather than Kingston itself, the cartouche depicts a harbor full of merchant vessels and one military gunboat, showing the welcome protection of the Royal Navy for West Indian commerce. The crowded commercial scene is full of dockside workers ferrying sugar, rum, molasses, and provisions overland and across the harbor in small skiffs. Two white men occupy prominent positions in the image, one a gentleman planter and the other a merchant, each with puncheons of rum and hogsheads of sugar at their feet. An open account book sits on a cabriole-legged desk near the two men. To the left is a substantial and elegant merchant’s house with a handsome portico. And in front of another stone engraved with the names of the prime minister, the Jamaican governor, and the two surveyors are two black men, a bag of coffee, and a stack of tropical lumber. The scene advertised Jamaica as a lush and bountiful land where Britons made money and engaged in genteel pursuits, assisted by African workers.

The third cartouche illustrated those pursuits. It showed a white man on foot, with dogs, cornering a large boar in a heavily forested countryside. The three scenes, overall, showed to English spectators an idealized Jamaica: a land of flourishing plantations and bustling towns, with abundant and quiescent black laborers serving wealthy aristocratic Europeans. Sugar and industry anchored the whole tableau. And women and free people of color were invisible.

Maps drawn in the 1720s of Saint-Domingue show not only that it was far larger than Jamaica, but that it was an even wilder place, at least in the first half of the eighteenth century. Jamaica became an English possession in one fell swoop in 1655, when an English invading force drove out a small Spanish colony. In contrast, Saint-Domingue became a French possession incrementally, as hunters and pirates living there began to accept the authority of French governors only around 1665. After this date the colony, or pieces of it, developed slowly under the control of various royal monopoly companies, coming under full royal governance only in the 1720s. In 1700 Jamaica had about seven thousand whites and forty thousand blacks; Saint-Domingue had 4,560 and 9,082 respectively.¹⁶ Although early eighteenth-century French maps depict a network of overland roads, the colony’s mountainous interior made shipping the most practical way to transport goods and people. Nevertheless, the colony’s complex coast was difficult to sail around, and local pirates preyed on Saint-Domingue’s coastal traffic until the 1730s.¹⁷

There were at least four factors besides geography and buccaneers that kept Saint-Domingue economically two or three decades behind Jamaica. First, Spain recognized French possession of the western coast of Hispaniola only in 1697, in the Treaty of Ryswick. Second, the French navy was ill equipped to protect the kingdom’s transatlantic commerce from foreign enemies or pirates. From a high point of one hundred ships of the line in 1680, it shrank to forty-nine in 1725.¹⁸ Third, the French slave trade started slowly. It was only in 1725, after bitter complaints from wealthy colonists about the Compagnie des Indes, which controlled France’s trade with West Africa, that Versailles opened the slave trade to all private merchants.

Figure 4. “Carte de l’isle de Saint Domingue. dressée en 1722 pour l’usage du roy, sur les mémoires de Mr. Frezier, ingénieur de S. M. et autres, assujetis aux observations astronomiques, Guillaume Delisle.” Paris, 1780. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

The fourth factor was the amount of investment sugar required. Father Labat, a Dominican priest who managed his order’s plantation in Martinique, described the technological and human workings of sugar plantations at the beginning of the eighteenth century in his widely read Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (1724). In a long and detailed chapter that was copied in commercial handbooks, he advocated a workforce of 120 slaves, which he believed in 1696 would produce net annual revenue of 38,030 livres for over a century, with “a little thriftiness.” But when Labat compared such an estate to the cacao walks he observed in Martinique around 1702, he noted that sugar required three times the investment as a cacao estate that produced the same revenues. This comparison, he noted, revealed “that the cacao walk is a rich gold mine, while a sugar estate is only an iron mine.”¹⁹

About the time Labat’s book was published, a fungal infestation destroyed the cacao sector in Saint-Domingue. But in the first half of the eighteenth century, most aspiring planters turned to indigo rather than sugar. Like sugar, indigo dye must be heavily processed after harvesting. But the indigo plant does not have to be crushed or its juice boiled. Instead, it is soaked in a series of masonry tanks until the dye precipitates into a powder, which is then drained and dried before shipping. Indigo cultivation is labor intensive, and the manufacturing process can be subtle, but it can be handled with less than a dozen slaves, a few water basins, and a skilled refiner. Not only was it cheaper to make than sugar, but indigo was easier to transport and store, which made it better suited for smuggling in parts of the colony where French commercial shipping was rare. Up to the mid-eighteenth century, indigo works in Saint-Domingue outnumbered sugar mills ten to one.²⁰

Sugar cultivation began in Saint-Domingue in the 1690s. The colony’s first sugar exports to France arrived in 1697. But it was only after the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713 that colonists began to build integrated plantations and to create large slave forces. Only after 1740 did Saint-Domingue reach the level of development Jamaica had attained by 1720. In 1730 it had just over seventy-nine thousand slaves, while in 1734 Jamaica had roughly eighty-six thousand slaves. By 1744, the enslaved population of the larger French colony had surpassed that of its neighbor, with 118,000 slaves compared to roughly 112,000 slaves in Jamaica.²¹ Besides buying African workers, each of whom cost roughly as much as a French silk weaver made in an entire year, Saint-Domingue’s largest sugar planters also invested in new plantation refineries to produce more valuable clayed, rather than brown or muscovado sugar.²² In 1730 the colony had eighteen sucreries en blanc, amounting to only 5 percent of its sugar estates. By 1753 there were 235 of these more elaborate factories, making up 42 percent of all Saint-Domingue sugar estates. In the region around Cap Français, 189 out of 290 sugar refineries (65 percent) produced clayed sugar.²³

Irrigation was another central element of Saint-Domingue’s transformation after 1730. Before the Revolution, very few irrigation projects were completed in France itself. Most of them ended because of litigation caused by competing or overlapping jurisdictions and property rights. In both Saint-Domingue and France after 1760 the royal state eventually worked to promote irrigation schemes, but before 1760 irrigation works were private projects, involving dozens or even hundreds of planters.²⁴ The first irrigation works were built in 1731 for two plantations in the Cul-de-Sac plain that would one day become the hinterland of Port-au-Prince. In 1737 another system in this region brought water to twenty-four sugar plantations, and after 1739 four plantations shared an irrigation works at Aquin on the southern coast. Other early sugar areas, like the plains around Léogane and Petit Goâve, followed with private irrigation schemes in the 1740s.²⁵ These investments expanded sugar planting into less fertile regions of the colony. They also provided power for water-driven sugar mills, helping make Saint-Domingue into the most efficient producer of tropical commodities in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic World. In the 1740s, as Saint-Domingue’s slave imports and sugar estates continued to grow, a new plantation crop emerged. Coffee, first planted in Saint-Domingue in 1738, thrived on hillsides that would not support indigo or sugarcane. In 1753 administrators counted nearly thirteen million coffee bushes. Moreover, the colony’s overall population nearly doubled, increasing 86 percent from 1730 to 1753, almost entirely because of the accelerating importation of enslaved Africans. In 1753 Saint-Domingue had 161,859 slaves, a number well above Jamaica’s slave population of 106,592 in 1752.²⁶

The nature of port records and other primary sources in this prestatistical age make it difficult to assess what Saint-Domingue’s total plantation exports might have been at midcentury. But it is clear that production from France’s largest Caribbean colony had caught and probably surpassed that of Jamaica and perhaps that of the entire British West Indies. Charles Frostin estimates that in 1740 Saint-Domingue’s sugar production of forty thousand tons surpassed that of the whole British Caribbean production of thirty-five thousand tons the same year.²⁷

Because the sugar plantation was the emblematic feature of the landscape in both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, by the last decades of the eighteenth century the wealthiest owners of these estates wanted to see images of the properties that supported them. In the 1770s, William Beckford, the wealthiest man in Jamaica, commissioned George Robertson (1735–1821) to paint views of Beckford’s Westmoreland sugar estates. Four of Robertson’s landscapes were popular enough that John Boydell made them into copperplate engravings in 1778. All four of the paintings featured tropical vegetation with rushing rivers in the foreground, with black men or women washing, fishing, or tending animals. One showed Beckford’s Fort William estate in the background with the Roaring River in the foreground (Figure 5). Robertson drew Beckford’s sugar works, and above it, on a hill, the planter’s residence. Smoke rises from the boiling house, suggesting a proto-industrial estate, but, in the twilight scene, the enslaved blacks with their baskets and livestock look more like exotic peasants than mill workers. In the center of the image, Beckford’s large white house dominated. Robertson thus suggests that the planter has successfully tamed not only the wild Jamaican landscape but also alien African workers.

Figure 5. “A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Fort William Estate, with Part of Roaring River, belonging to William Beckford, Esqr. Near Savannah La Marr, Westmoreland, 1778,” drawn on the spot by George Robertson, engraved by Thomas Vivares. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

All mid-eighteenth-century British America plantation societies entered into a prolonged period of affluence that lasted from around the 1730s until the end of the Seven Years’ War, as they also did in the French Antilles.²⁸ Boydell’s engraving of Robertson’s painting reflects that prosperity. Profits in the West Indies, however, were far greater than those in the southern colonies of British North America. From the 1740s through to the mid-1770s, British West Indian returns on capital were over 10 percent per annum, reflecting the efficiencies of the integrated plantation model.²⁹ Jamaica became the leading exporter of sugar in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Productivity was extraordinarily high. Between 1750, when per capita productivity per annum based on both the white and the black population was around £8 sterling, and 1800, when per capita productivity per annum was £29.2, or 675 livres, Jamaican productivity expanded to reach probably its natural limits. The Jamaican economy performed strongly not only in comparison with other plantation economies but also relative to emerging industrial nations. On the eve of the American Revolution, when individual wealth (if not productivity) probably peaked, Jamaica was as important to Britain in terms of wealth creation as a large British county.³⁰ Saint-Domingue may have exceeded it in average wealth, but we do not have the figures to justify this assertion. Jamaican sugar planters were among the most accomplished capitalists of their time. Today we see them as ruthlessly using and discarding hundreds of thousands of men and women of African descent. But contemporaries viewed them as entrepreneurs who successfully manipulated a complex agro-industrial technology, supplying their compatriots with a highly desirable product at an ever cheaper price. Their activities were the lynchpin of an Atlantic trade network, linking Africa and Europe with the Caribbean.³¹

Jamaica’s sugar plantations increased in number from approximately 150 in 1700 to 775 in 1774. Sugar output increased from five thousand tons in 1700, to sixteen thousand tons by 1734, twenty thousand tons in 1754 and to forty thousand tons by 1774. At the same time total exports, of which somewhat over half were sugar exports, increased nearly eight-fold between 1700 and 1774, from £325,000 in 1700 to £1,025,000 in 1750 and £2,400,000 (or 55 million livres) in 1774.³² Sugar was produced by industrial-sized plantation units, customarily containing between 150 and 300 enslaved persons. Such labor forces were the largest in British America, far larger than the crews of around fifty slaves that worked large tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake and the slightly larger forces that labored on rice plantations in South Carolina.³³

From the mid-1740s, Jamaica entered into an explosive period of growth. The establishment of peace with the Maroons (independent communities of people of African descent living in the Jamaican interior who from the early eighteenth century fought a twenty-year war against the British government) in 1739 allowed sugar planting to expand into the northwestern parishes of St. James and Hanover as well as into the eastern parish of St. Thomas-in-the-East. It is noteworthy that these years saw only very slow white population growth. The number of whites barely increased in the disease-ridden years between the earthquake at Port Royal in 1690s and the start of the American Revolution. The only firm figures we have are that there were 7,768 whites in 1673 and 8,230 in 1730 and probably no more than ten thousand by the start of the Seven Years’ War. In 1774, a census, most of the details of which are lost, suggested a white population of 12,737. Thus, the number of whites on the island, despite considerable migration from Britain, had grown by only 4,969 between 1673 and 1774 or by less than fifty people per annum.³⁴ At the same time the black population increased rapidly, entirely owing to an ever expanding slave trade. The number in slaves in Jamaica catapulted in the eighteenth century to 74,523 in 1730 and to 192,787 in 1774.³⁵ Outnumbered eighteen to one, whites understood that this influx of workers was the source of their rising prosperity.³⁶

The wealth of Jamaica was extracted out of the bodies of enslaved people. Apart from those in Saint-Domingue and perhaps Dutch Guiana, the lives of the enslaved population in Jamaica were the most miserable in the Atlantic World, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century, when planters were carving out plantations from frontier land and when the great majority of slaves were traumatized, brutalized, and alienated migrants from Africa. The sources for this period, nearly all produced by whites, militate against any true appreciation of what slaves went through. But it seems certain that the first half of the eighteenth century marked the nadir of black life in Jamaica. Slavery had always been brutal in British America, but the level of violence exercised against Africans dramatically increased as the slave population grew.³⁷

British Jamaica was always an incredibly violent place, even before the sugar planters arrived. In the seventeenth century, royal authorities subjected pirates to gruesome executions while masters commonly whipped and chained their white servants. Africans, however, got the worst of the treatment. John Taylor, writing in 1688, dwelt almost lovingly on the barbaric tortures that planters forced on slaves caught in rebellions. He was convinced that it was only through terror that Africans could be controlled. He told a lengthy story about how “Collonel Ivey” discovered a plot against him and how he cornered his slaves and read out details from Jamaica’s slave code (a book that “is hated by those slaves, and they still say ’tis the divile’s book”). Ivey acted as judge and jury of his frightened slaves. He “caused all his slaves to be bound and fetter’d with irons, … and then caus’d them to be severely whip’t, caused some to be roasted alive, and others to be torn to peices with dogs, others he cutt off their ears, feets and codds, and caused them to eat ’em; then he putt them all in iron feters, and soe with severe whipping every day forced them to work, and soe in time they became obedient and quiet, and have never since offer’d to rebel. Thus did God bring to nothing their damnable disigne, and prevent the horrid rebellion and murther they intended.”³⁸

Matters got worse for slaves in the eighteenth century. Even planters’ defenders admitted that they used abnormal levels of cruelty against slaves. Indeed, they reverted to punishments, such as castration and burning by slow fire, which had lost favor in Britain since medieval times. The rector of St. Catherine parish noted in 1751 that when planters sought “to deprive [negroes] of their funeral rites by burning their dead Bodies, [it] seems to Negroes a greater punishment than Death itself.”³⁹ He wrote this just a year after Thomas Thistlewood had arrived in Westmoreland parish. Thistlewood’s diary entries prove the truth of what the minister wrote to the Bishop of London. Twelve days after arriving in Westmorland, on 12 April 1750, he watched his employer, William Dorrill, apply “justice” to runaway slaves by whipping them severely and rubbing lime juice, salt, and pepper into their wounds. Not long after he saw the chief slave on the estate getting “300 lashes for his many crimes and negligences.” On 1 October 1750, visiting the St. Elizabeth town of Lacovia, he “Saw a negroe fellow named English … Tried [in] Court and hang’d upon ye 1st tree immediately ([for] drawing his knife upon a White Man) his hand cut off, Body left unbury’d.”

This unbridled cruelty included forms of psychological debasement. On 19 March 1752, for example, Thistlewood related with amusement some stories that speak volumes about the character of life on the Jamaican frontier. “This morning,” he noted, “Old Tom Williams,” the patriarch of a major planting family, “Call’d and made his observations as usual.” Thistlewood recorded two stories that he evidently found funny. Williams told him first how he had once killed a young girl with diarrhea by “Stopping her Anus with a Corn Stick.” Then he told a story about how when he felt a domestic was doing a poor job cleaning his house, “he Shitt in it and told her there was Something for her to clean.” With attitudes like this, it is little wonder that Charles Leslie declared in 1740 that “No Country excels them in barbarous Treatment of Slaves, or in the cruel Methods they put them to death.”⁴⁰

In the end, however, it may have been planters’ interest in increasing workers’ productivity, not their commitment to brutality, which affected slaves most. Caribbean planters were relentless innovators, anxious to try new methods or tinker with existing technology to increase their profits. The efficient use of slave labor was the key to the profitability of the integrated sugar estate. As Henry Drax of Barbados explained in the mid-seventeenth century “There must be especial Care taken in working the Hands, that every negro doth his part according to his Ability…. The best way that I know of to prevent Idleness, and to make the Negroes to their work properly, will be upon the change of work, constantly to Gang all the Negroes in the plantations in the Time of Planting.”⁴¹ Sugar planters saw themselves as enlightened improvers and from the mid-eighteenth century began to publish books outlining their plantation methods.⁴² Many of these ideas came out of the Lesser Antilles, smaller islands where geography placed a premium on efficiency, but Jamaica also participated in such reforms. The Jamaican historian Edward Long declared in 1774, “A spirit of experiment has of late appeared which, by quitting the old beaten track, promises to strike out continual improvement.”⁴³

The key part of what Antiguan planter Samuel Martin called a “well-constructed machine” was its human component. Planters devoted enormous attention to improving their human capital so that enslaved people could work more efficiently and, more important, could increase in value over time.⁴⁴ One indication of the hardheadedness and calculating business sense of Jamaican slave owners was their determination to get as much value out of enslaved women’s labor as they could. West Indian planters divided slaves by physical capacity rather than by sex. They insisted that the “stoutest and most able slaves … without any regard being had to their sex” should do the hardest work, such as digging cane holes, dunging, and cutting and harvesting cane. By the early eighteenth century, women were the majority of field hands on Jamaican sugar plantations. Plantations that needed extra labor hired women and men at the same rate, suggesting that there was little distinction in what they did as ordinary field laborers. This lack of gender differentiation in field work persisted until the end of slavery. David Collins in 1803 insisted that there are “many women who are capable of as much labour as man, and some men, of constitutions so delicate, as to be incapable of toil as the weakest women.”⁴⁵ Planters were so determined to utilize women’s labor capacities that they gave little attention to alleviating field work for sick or pregnant women. Planters were reluctant to lose women’s labor. Slave reproduction came very low on the list of their priorities. Most women worked in the fields up to close to the time they gave birth and were returned to the field soon after. Able female field hands probably had no more than five weeks before and after birth where they were released from arduous field work.⁴⁶

There is some evidence that planters worked women even harder than men. They were more likely than men to be field laborers, and they did extremely physically demanding tasks, such as cane holing and dunging, in greater proportions than did men. Accordingly, women tended to have very high rates of sickness. By the late eighteenth century planters began to admit that the demands they placed on women, especially young women at the start of their childbearing years, were too great. Jamaica planter Gilbert Mathison conceded in the early nineteenth century that “perhaps young females are too much subjected to hard labour at an early and critical period of their lives.” Nevertheless, slave women proved demographically tougher than slave men. Slave labor patterns on Mesopotamia Estate in the second half of the eighteenth century suggest that women had longer life expectancies than men and enjoyed lower death rates.⁴⁷

Despite planters’ Enlightenment ethos of rational improvement, they were largely unwilling to apply those ideals to improve the lives of their enslaved laborers. The hallmarks of the large integrated plantation were discipline, coordination, and coercion. Planters were determined to make slaves work as hard as they could. They concerned themselves little about the deaths such demands produced. Our best data on the workload of Jamaican slaves comes from late in the eighteenth century. At Prospect Estate in the developing parish of Portland, slaves worked twelve hours a day for an average of 272 days, with sixty days off. Illness or other problems stopped work for thirty-three days.⁴⁸ During their days off, enslaved people produced their own food, constructed their own housing, and attended to the needs of themselves and their children. Like the cotton mills of early industrial England, which depended on fresh inputs of laborers from the countryside to replace worn-out or dead workers, the sugar plantation depended on a functioning slave trade to maintain numbers. It was a consuming industry to cater to the growing consumer markets of western Europe.

In the French Caribbean, early eighteenth-century missionary accounts provide some indication of colonists’ attitudes toward the enslaved men and women whose labor was transforming Saint-Domingue. When the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix described Saint-Domingue sugar slavery in the 1720s, he was struck by the workers’ misery, the rags they wore, and their lack of food. Yet he contrasted their “perfect health” with the “infinity of illness” that plagued their French masters.⁴⁹ Frustrated by the apparent inability of some Africans to learn even the Lord’s Prayer, Charlevoix used a mechanical metaphor to describe their “extremely limited intelligence,” describing Africans as “machines whose springs must be rewound each time that you want them to move.” Though he called the whip a necessary disciplinary tool, Charlevoix believed that the French were kinder masters than the English. If Saint-Domingue bordered an English colony, he claimed, most of the slaves would decamp to the French side.⁵⁰

Writing a few decades earlier in Martinique, Jean-Baptiste Labat, who was both a missionary and a planter, also believed the English were crueler than the French. In 1696, after warning his readers about the frequency of deadly accidents at the sugar mill, where careless workers might be dragged into the rollers, he claimed that the English used their sugar mills to execute slaves who committed major crimes, gradually lowering their living bodies into the machine.⁵¹ Yet Labat highlighted the industrial character of plantations like the one he directed in Martinique: “Whatever you say about the work in an iron forge or glass factory or others, it is clear that there is nothing harder than that of a sugar mill, since in the former there are no more than 12 hours of work, while in a sugar mill there are 18 hours of work a day.” Because of mill workers’ lack of sleep, Labat advised planters to force them either to sing or to smoke so they would not doze off and fall into the cauldrons of boiling sugar.⁵²

There are almost no such missionary accounts from the French Antilles after the 1730s, but census reports show the rapid expansion of the plantation sector in Saint-Domingue after this date. The number of sugar estates expanded from 450 in 1739 to 636 in 1771. These were large operations, though still notably smaller at this date than estates in Jamaica. For the 1770s, David Geggus calculates that the average size of a sugar estate slave force was roughly 160. Exports from the Antilles to France, of which Saint-Domingue’s products constituted the majority, increased from nearly 60 million livres tournois in 1749 to over 178 million in 1778 (£7.7 million). This output was largely the result of the fact that the colony’s enslaved population more than doubled, from just fewer than 109,000 in 1739 to just under 220,000 in 1771. The free population of color expanded at an even faster rate over the same period, from 2,545 to 6,480. During the same time the white population grew only 60 percent, from 11,600 to 18,400. Where whites were roughly 9 percent of the total population in 1739, in 1771 they were only 7 percent.⁵³

By the 1780s, the twin themes of profit and misery were more central than ever to French Caribbean colonization. An unusual and disturbing map and vignettes of Saint-Domingue’s Févret de Saint-Mésmin sugar estate captures these overlapping realities for an absentee investor. On the one hand, the water-colored estate plan drawn by the royal engineer Louis de Beauvernet conforms to the Enlightenment ideal of rational planning (Figure 6). Trained in the latest surveying and cartographic techniques Beauvernet likely had seen the widely circulated prints of the royal salt works conceived by Claude-Nicholas Ledoux between 1775 and 1778, years when Beauvernet was in France. Ledoux planned a large preindustrial workplace, the Salines de Chaux, at Arc-et-Senans about eighty-nine kilometers from Beauvernet’s native city of Dijon.⁵⁴ Like Ledoux’s celebrated image, Beauvernet’s sugar plantation map appears, at first glance, to celebrate the idea of harmony between the forces of nature and man’s organizing genius. Tropical savannah land and cane fields dominate the central panel of the image, but they are traversed by rectilinear roads, as well as by a meandering stream. At the center are the plantation’s buildings, the most distinctive of which are the large sugar mill and, nearby, twenty tiny rectangular slave huts aligned in two close columns. One key lists the thirteen buildings and another key names the thirteen parcels of land, mostly cane fields, that surround the manufacturing center. A compass rose and an elaborate cartouche identifying the estate, its owner and location, and the artist provide the aesthetic trappings of an elaborate map.

Figure 6. “Plan de l’habitation de Févret de Saint-Mésmin, à Saint-Domingue, Louis de Beauvernet.” © RMN-Blérancourt, Musée franco-américain du château de Blérancourt.

Beauvernet drew the plan for the estate’s absentee owner, Févret de Saint-Mésmin, a parlementary judge in Dijon who had inherited the estate from his creole mother and army officer father. He kept decades of plantation registers and letter books about this estate.⁵⁵ Yet the six vignettes that Beauvernet painted around the central map made this document more an artistic object than a management tool. The Févret family had a notable painting collection, and, during the French Revolution, the judge’s son Charles became a well-known portraitist and engraver in New York, until returning to Dijon to serve as director of the city museum. Descended from a Dijon noble family himself, Beauvernet likely knew of the Févrets’ artistic interests.⁵⁶ Given the modest size of Beauvernet’s estate plan (17 inches by 25.5 inches; 44 cm by 62 cm), Févret likely kept it in a portfolio or album, perhaps for showing to guests in the family’s Dijon mansion.

Beauvernet’s six vignettes of plantation life are somewhat realistic. For example, the plantation had the single refinery and two animal-driven sugar mills he portrayed.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, the engineer took liberties that made his scenes strikingly metaphorical. All but one vignette shows ships on the sea, although the Févret plantation was completely landlocked. The managers of Févret’s plantation probably used the wharf of the adjoining Motmans’ estate, as Févret’s wife was a member of the Motmans family.⁵⁸ But Beauvernet’s fascination with shipping, as well as with the machinery of the sugar plantation, reveals his vision of Saint-Domingue as a world of commerce and manufacturing, as well as agriculture. The ships linked the estate to metropolitan consumers, and to the Févret family, who consumed the profits from the estate. Beauvernet understood that his patrons were likely preoccupied with the moment when their barrels of sugar would be boarded onto a ship. In 1776 their instructions pressed their estate manager to send them 120 barrels of sugar a year.⁵⁹ Beauvernet devoted one vignette to this moment. In it, white men repair a beached ship, and men wave to another vessel out at sea. Two or three white children sit on timbers as a smaller boat arrives at the shore. This is the sole painting in which whites outnumber blacks, who are depicted here only as three diminutive figures in the foreground rolling a large cask toward the sea.

Although he was a royal engineer, Beauvernet was not a military man but rather came to Saint-Domingue to make his fortune.⁶⁰ There is no evidence that he saw plantation slavery as pernicious. Indeed, when he painted this image he was probably involved in a scheme to open up new sugar land in the undeveloped Cayes de Jacmel parish. Beauvernet’s wife was one of at least six investors who received a royal land grant as part of a group that planned to construct a joint irrigation works on this virgin territory.⁶¹ This project was precisely the kind of technical investment that Beauvernet was trained to design and implement. As an aspiring sugar planter, Beauvernet likely believed that slavery was even more essential to tropical agriculture than irrigation.

In nearly all his images, naked and suffering black bodies outnumbered white figures, which were always clothed, often luxuriously. In one vignette, two white men on horseback arrive at the beach where they are greeted by a third white man. They peer at ships on the sea, apparently oblivious to the fact that several yards away a nearly naked black woman, tied to a ladder, is being whipped by a black man, who wears only white breeches. Beauvernet’s vignettes depict a violent plantation world in which whites ignore the pain that surrounds—and indeed supports—them. His view of a waterfall near the plantation shows a large alligator or caiman that has surprised two black bathers. One of them, in the center of the image, is about to be devoured by the creature, whose jagged teeth and large eye make him much more of an individual than his victim.

Figure 7. “Vue Perspective de la Purgerie et d’une partie des Batimens, Plan de l’habitation de Févret de Saint-Mésmin, à Saint-Domingue, Louis de Beauvernet.” © RMN-Blérancourt, Musée franco-américain du Château de Blérancourt.

Two of Beauvernet’s vignettes focus on the productivity of Févret’s estate. Figure 7 shows the sugar refinery in full operation. Here, as in figure 8, naked suffering slaves are shown as part of the tropical landscape. The refinery building has no walls, allowing Beauvernet to depict five black figures with long-handled tools, stirring the sugar syrup as it boils, while a ship approaches in the distance. In the foreground a black man holds a whip high above his head as he chases a woman who raises her arms in distress. Another vignette, not shown here, shows the plantation’s two animal-driven cane mills and contains eight human and three animal figures. Two or perhaps three of the humans are holding whips in midstroke, above the animals in two cases and perhaps above a human in the third. One trio consists of two persons standing with a third kneeling between them.

Figure 8. [Untitled cartouche of woman in carriage with slaves] “Plan de l’habitation de Févret de Saint-Mésmin, à Saint-Domingue, Louis de Beauvernet.” © RMN-Blérancourt, Musée franco-américain du Château de Blérancourt.

Beauvernet not only showed Févret his estate’s productive assets—its processing centers and their coerced human and animal workers—he also illustrated the wealth these machines generated. In figure 8 two horses with ostentatiously studded harnesses draw a handsome carriage along a coastal road. Inside the carriage, at the very center of the image, sits a richly dressed white woman. This may have been Judge Févret’s creole mother-in-law, Mme. Motmans, who was criticized for her extravagant domestic service.⁶² She is not driving the vehicle, for its reins are being held by a black man riding alongside on a third horse, carrying the omnipresent whip. Two black postilions stand on the back of the carriage, wearing the same livery as the rider—white turbans with a single red feather, red jackets trimmed in white, and a white shirt.

In the left foreground, Beauvernet depicts a black couple whose naked suffering stand in stark contrast to the comfortable passenger. The man and woman wear heavy chains around their wrists. The larger of the two figures is also wearing a special iron collar, a device designed to humiliate and to isolate slaves found eating sugarcane or committing other minor violations of plantation discipline. The iron arms of the collar, with their barbed ends, stick out at a forty-five-degree angle, extending far over the man’s shoulders. The composition reinforces the marked contrast between the grandeur of the men and horses accompanying Mme. Motmans and the abject misery and animalistic treatment of the chained pair. Moreover Beauvernet depicts Mme. Motmans and her attendants as unaware of this scene of degradation. The cruelty of plantation life, Beauvernet suggests, is what keeps the wheels of commerce turning.

In 1779 the army officer Desdorides confirmed this when he described colonists’ casual attitude about cruelty in Saint-Domingue: “They do not always take care to remove the children when the slaves are punished. Those who frequently witness these punishments become hardened to it; they run as to a game to see an unhappy slave be whipped…. I have heard a mother boast of her son that at the age of ten he was strong enough to ‘cut’ a slave, that is to remove his skin with the stroke of a whip.”⁶³ The Févret images illustrated an omnipresent reality in the slave colonies of the Greater Antilles. Violence was at the base of all the wealth and social and political power in slave societies in the region.

In his influential study of the English West Indies in the seventeenth century, Richard Dunn put forward a thesis on the social character of the West Indies that has proven very enduring. Looking at the development of the British West Indies as a student of Puritan New England and early modern European history, Dunn discounted the economic success of places like mid-seventeenth-century Barbados. He concluded that these societies were social failures, monstrous societies that were moral indictments of the process of European colonization in the Americas.⁶⁴

That the colonial experience of the West Indies was socially and morally repugnant has been a strong theme in writings on the period. The Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul famously described them as places of mimicry where nothing original was created.⁶⁵ This characterization of the West Indies as a cultural and political wasteland has, of course, been extensively critiqued, from Aimé Césaire to Kamau Braithwaite and beyond. These opponents of Naipaul’s depressing vision, however, have generally seen the Afro-Caribbean struggle against oppression as the fundamental source of Caribbean creativity, while describing the plantation as the essential colonial institution that creative Caribbean peoples struggled against. Vincent Brown has recently reinforced these arguments, mainly as a way of trying to overcome what he sees as the nihilistic assumptions embedded in the notion that Caribbean slavery was a form of “social death,” in which the slave self was irrevocably harmed through the process of being ripped away in the Atlantic slave trade from communities and familiar landscapes in Africa. He believes that slaves “must have found some way to turn the disorganization, instability, and chaos of slavery into collective forms of belonging and striving, making connections when confronted with alienation and finding dignity in the face of dishonor.”⁶⁶

This literature on colonization, creolization, and cultural mimesis in the Greater Antilles is rich, confrontational, and intellectually challenging. What we want to suggest, however, is that the plantation world of the eighteenth-century Greater Antilles should not be viewed only in terms of horror.⁶⁷ Death and despair were abundantly in evidence on the plantation, as the Févret map and vignettes show. That neither the white nor the black populations of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue and Jamaica could naturally reproduce their population is one more testimony to the destructive character of the plantation system. Yet the plantation system was also a place of dramatic vitality. Enslaved persons’ creative attempts to overcome or evade slavery are reason enough to see slavery’s power as both destructive and productive; in other words, enslaved people’s fear of social death was not incapacitating but generative.⁶⁸ It was more than just a machine for the accumulation of wealth. We turn in the next chapter to look at some manifestations of that world in the urban life of both colonies and in the startlingly untraditional relationships between men and women of all races between the Seven Years’ War and the start of the French Revolution.