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

The short answer

• Sugar demanded an unending supply of labour. Sugar was the most profitable crop of the eighteenth century and the most demanding of labour, since cane had to be cut and milled within hours to avoid spoiling. Saint-Domingue’s planters expanded production rapidly after the 1760s, adding coffee in the mountains, and every new estate needed hundreds of workers. Because the work killed faster than families could grow, the colony’s wealth depended on buying ever more Africans. Prosperity and the slave trade grew together.
• Death kept the plantations African. Deaths outnumbered births on the sugar estates, from overwork, poor food and disease, so the enslaved population could only be maintained by new purchases. The result was a workforce in which most adults had been born free in Africa, many of them former soldiers, and fewer had grown up knowing only slavery. Planters believed terror could control them. In fact the brutality that made the system profitable also created a majority with memories of freedom and the skills to fight for it.
• A free society divided by colour. Free people of colour were nearly as numerous as whites by 1789, and many were prosperous planters, yet laws passed since the 1760s barred them from many offices and professions and even regulated their clothing. White colonists, rich and poor, defended these laws because racial status was the foundation of their own privileges. That quarrel between free people meant that any crisis in France would divide the colony’s masters at the very moment they needed unity.
• Colonists who resented their mother country. France governed Saint-Domingue through the exclusif, a law obliging the colony to trade mainly with French merchants and ships, much like a company town forced to buy from the company store. Wealthy planters resented it and dreamed of governing themselves, as Britain’s North American colonies had recently done. Their hope for autonomy would lead them to challenge royal officials in 1789, and that challenge to authority, begun by the rich, would be taken up by everyone beneath them.

What it changed

The colonists demand power. Planters elected colonial assemblies, the most radical meeting at Saint-Marc in 1790, and defied the royal governor in the name of colonial autonomy. They insisted that slavery and race were matters for colonists alone. Their revolt against Paris showed everyone else in the colony that authority could be challenged, and it invited poorer whites and free people of colour to press claims of their own, the lesson the next chapter follows.

Free people of colour claim equality. In Paris, free men of colour lobbied the National Assembly for the rights of citizens, while in the colony white militias answered them with violence. When Vincent Ogé took up arms to enforce those rights in October 1790, his defeat and public execution turned a legal claim into a war. The free people of colour would become a decisive force in every later phase of the revolution.

An African-born majority with its own aims. The enslaved watched the quarrels of their masters and drew their own conclusions. Their aims were shaped by African experience and by life on the estates: an end to the whip, free time to work their own plots, and for many the right to land. When they rose in August 1791 they acted on aims of their own, and that independence of purpose would define Haiti.

Plantation land, then settler land. The charcoal sugar plains of this map have a counterpart in the second case: Kenya’s White Highlands, where European settlers held the best land and African labour worked it. In both colonies the struggle for independence would turn on who owned the land, and in both the answer after independence would disappoint many of those who had fought for it.