Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page B

the
    worshipers who gathered around it each evening, especially on Fridays,
    and most of all on Good Friday, placing hundreds of burning candles un-
    s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e
    17
    derneath it, so that the floor was covered with wax and the walls stained
    with smoke. Normally the climate of Petit-Goâve bred masses of mosqui-
    toes, but there were few in the town thanks to the cross from Cartagena.23
    Having gained official status as a French colony, Saint-Domingue—one
    of the last colonies founded in the Americas—would soon outshine all
    others. The earliest plantations in Saint-Domingue were worked by both
    African slaves and European engagés, or indentured laborers. The latter worked alongside the slaves, but for limited terms—in the French case
    for three years—after which they became free. Along with the remaining
    flibustiers and boucaniers, many of these former indentured laborers started farming small plots of land, notably with tobacco, a crop that required little initial investment and could quickly turn a modest profit.
    But the competition of Virginia tobacco, changing colonial policies, and
    the emergence of other crops soon ended tobacco cultivation in Saint-
    Domingue. The second crop to take off in the colony, indigo, involved a
    more sophisticated processing procedure that turned the harvested grasses
    into a blue dye, and so required a bit more capital. Nevertheless, small in-
    digo plantations appeared throughout the colony. This crop would remain
    an important part of the island’s economy, but it was soon overshadowed by
    the crop that came to dominate Saint-Domingue for the rest of its century-
    long existence: sugar.
    Sugar was the economic miracle of the eighteenth century. Originally
    from the Middle East, sugarcane had been cultivated on Spanish and Por-
    tuguese islands of the eastern Atlantic for centuries. The Spanish in His-
    paniola and the Portuguese in Brazil pioneered cane cultivation in the
    Americas, and the French and English drew on their examples and on the
    knowledge and finances of the Dutch in establishing their plantation socie-
    ties in the Caribbean. These colonies both depended on and drove the ex-
    pansion of the emerging capitalist system of the Atlantic world. Starting in
    the seventeenth century a remarkable spiral of cause and effect trans-
    formed sugar from a luxury enjoyed by only the wealthiest Europeans to a
    necessity that was a central part of many Europeans’ diets.24
    Slavery was deemed essential to the production of sugar. In the Carib-
    bean, plantations often had several hundred slaves carrying out the
    difficult tasks of planting and harvesting cane, and a smaller group special-
    izing in its transformation into sugar. Once harvested, cane must be pro-
    cessed quickly, and during certain periods work continued all night. The
    highly diversified and industrialized sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue
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    av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
    and its nearby British competitor Jamaica had some of the largest numbers
    of slaves of any colonies in the Americas. A fifth of the slaves on these
    plantations worked in occupations other than fieldwork, as specialists who
    processed the sugarcane, as artisans making barrels to transport it, or as
    domestics serving masters or managers. The combination of “field” and
    “factory” made the plantation regions of the Caribbean some of the most
    industrialized in the eighteenth-century world.25
    At first many plantations were worked by a combination of African
    slaves and white indentured laborers. In Saint-Domingue in 1687, whites
    outnumbered slaves, 4,411 to 3,358. But by eighteenth century, labor in
    the Caribbean had been deliberately and obsessively racialized. With the
    exception of a few managers and overseers, plantation workforces were en-
    tirely of African descent. In Saint-Domingue by 1700, the population of
    slaves had grown to 9,082, while the population of whites had