ON THIS DAY ·
Santo Domingo
1789–1844 — Santo Domingo was the capital of the older, poorer Spanish colony, where far fewer people were enslaved than in the French west. Toussaint took possession on 26 January 1801 and abolished slavery. Haiti ruled the territory from 1822, until it declared itself the Dominican Republic on 27 February 1844.
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The moment in context
The sugar on European tables passed through a system that joined French ports, African coasts and Caribbean plantations. Ships left Nantes, Bordeaux and Le Havre carrying French goods, bought captives in Africa and landed nearly 30,000 people a year in Saint-Domingue in the late 1780s. Most came from West Central Africa, the region of the Kongo kingdom, and the Bight of Benin, on the coast of present-day Togo, Benin and southwestern Nigeria. From roughly 800 sugar estates and more than 3,000 coffee farms, produce went back to France for refining and re-export across Europe. The arrows trace this traffic. Cap-Français, the main port, known to everyone as Le Cap, had a theater, newspapers and a scientific society. Its prosperity was inseparable from the violence that supplied its labor.
From Slavery in colonial Saint-Domingue, chapter 1 of Two Roads to Independence: Haiti 1789–1838 and Kenya 1895–1978 (1789).
The place: Santo Domingo — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — 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…
- The turn — Cap-Français, autumn 1789. News from France reached Le Cap in autumn 1789 with several groups ready to draw different lessons from it. The Estates-General, the king's…
- 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…
Then ask the room: Was Saint-Domingue’s wealth the main reason it erupted into revolution? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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