Was Saint-Domingue’s wealth the main cause of revolution?

The short answer

• Sugar demanded an unending supply of labour. Cane had to be cut and milled within hours before it spoiled. That made sugar, the eighteenth century's most profitable crop, exceptionally demanding of labor. After the 1760s Saint-Domingue's planters expanded sugar and added mountain coffee estates, each new estate requiring hundreds of workers. The work killed faster than families could grow. More production consequently meant buying more Africans: the colony's prosperity and the slave trade expanded together.
• Death kept the plantations African. Overwork, inadequate food and disease made deaths exceed births on the sugar estates. Planters replenished their labor force through purchases, bringing in adults who had been born free in Africa; many had been soldiers, and fewer had grown up knowing only slavery. Terror was intended to keep them working. Yet the same system assembled a majority with memories of freedom and, in many cases, military skills.
• A free society divided by colour. Free people of colour were nearly as numerous as whites by 1789, and many were prosperous planters. Their wealth did not secure equal standing. Since the 1760s laws had barred them from offices and professions and even regulated their clothing. Rich and poor whites defended restrictions on which their own racial privileges rested. A crisis arriving from France would find the free population divided over who should exercise power.
• Colonists who resented their mother country. Under the exclusif, Saint-Domingue had to trade mainly with French merchants and ships, rather like a company town obliged to buy from the company store. Wealthy planters resented the restriction and looked toward self-government after the recent independence of Britain's North American colonies. In 1789 they challenged royal officials to gain more control. Once the rich had challenged authority, people beneath them could make claims of their own.

What it changed

The colonists demand power. The planters created colonial assemblies to pursue autonomy against the royal governor. At Saint-Marc in 1790, the most radical assembly insisted that colonists alone should decide questions of slavery and race. But defiance could be learned by others: poorer whites and free people of colour pressed claims of their own. The next chapter follows that struggle.

Free people of colour claim equality. A claim made in Paris became a conflict in the colony. Free men of colour sought citizens' rights from the National Assembly, while white militias met their demands with violence. Vincent Ogé took up arms to enforce those rights in October 1790; his defeat and public execution turned the legal claim into a war. Free people of colour would remain a decisive force throughout the revolution.

An African-born majority with its own aims. The enslaved had reasons of their own to follow their masters' quarrels. African experience and life on the estates shaped demands to end the whip, obtain free time for their plots and, for many, gain land. Their August 1791 rising pursued those aims. Independent purpose would help define Haiti.

Plantation land, then settler land. Land connects the charcoal sugar plains to the atlas's second case. In Kenya's White Highlands, European settlers held the best land and African labor worked it. Ownership would be central to both independence struggles, yet the arrangements after independence disappointed many who had fought in them.