The Colony of Saint-Domingue and the Roots of the Haitian Revolution

Saint-Domingue occupied the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, a division confirmed by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 after decades of French buccaneer settlement on the offshore island of Tortuga. By 1789 the colony, nicknamed "the pearl of the Antilles," had become the richest colony in the world: it produced roughly 40 percent of the sugar and 60 percent of the coffee consumed in Europe, and colonial trade with Saint-Domingue accounted for between one-third and two-thirds of France's entire foreign trade. Its wealth rested on the labor of an enormous enslaved population — an estimated 500,000 people out of a total population of some 520,000 to 560,000 by 1789 — sustained only by the constant importation of Africans, since mortality among enslaved workers on the sugar and coffee plantations was so severe that the population could not reproduce itself.