The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

sold to Jamaican planters to labor as sugar workers. Second, their labor produced a planter class with wealth and influence unprecedented in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Elite planters remained the dominant social and political force on the island, despite demographic disaster and metropolitan opposition, until after the end of slavery in 1838. This new plantation world was reflected in the Craskell and Simpson maps of 1763. The engraver, Daniel Fournier of London, included ornate title cartouches that showed just how far Jamaica had developed since perilous times in the 1690s and 1700s. The three scenes showed a confident planter class at work and at play. In the left-hand bottom corner, a planter posed next to an ornate stone on which the names of the governor commissioning the map and the two surveyors were engraved. A kneeling and sub-servient black man carrying pails of water accompanied the planter. Behind him was a well-ordered plantation with a working windmill, cattle trudging along a pathway, and a harbor with ships docked in the distance. Notably absent were the mass of enslaved people necessary for a functioning sugar plantation.

      Counterposed to this scene of rural productivity was an urban scene in the right-hand top corner. Likely a composite picture of British West Indian ports rather than Kingston itself, the cartouche depicts a harbor full of merchant vessels and one military gunboat, showing the welcome protection of the Royal Navy for West Indian commerce. The crowded commercial scene is full of dockside workers ferrying sugar, rum, molasses, and provisions overland and across the harbor in small skiffs. Two white men occupy prominent positions in the image, one a gentleman planter and the other a merchant, each with puncheons of rum and hogsheads of sugar at their feet. An open account book sits on a cabriole-legged desk near the two men. To the left is a substantial and elegant merchant’s house with a handsome portico. And in front of another stone engraved with the names of the prime minister, the Jamaican governor, and the two surveyors are two black men, a bag of coffee, and a stack of tropical lumber. The scene advertised Jamaica as a lush and bountiful land where Britons made money and engaged in genteel pursuits, assisted by African workers.

      The third cartouche illustrated those pursuits. It showed a white man on foot, with dogs, cornering a large boar in a heavily forested countryside. The three scenes, overall, showed to English spectators an idealized Jamaica: a land of flourishing plantations and bustling towns, with abundant and quiescent black laborers serving wealthy aristocratic Europeans. Sugar and industry anchored the whole tableau. And women and free people of color were invisible.

      Maps drawn in the 1720s of Saint-Domingue show not only that it was far larger than Jamaica, but that it was an even wilder place, at least in the first half of the eighteenth century. Jamaica became an English possession in one fell swoop in 1655, when an English invading force drove out a small Spanish colony. In contrast, Saint-Domingue became a French possession incrementally, as hunters and pirates living there began to accept the authority of French governors only around 1665. After this date the colony, or pieces of it, developed slowly under the control of various royal monopoly companies, coming under full royal governance only in the 1720s. In 1700 Jamaica had about seven thousand whites and forty thousand blacks; Saint-Domingue had 4,560 and 9,082 respectively.¹⁶ Although early eighteenth-century French maps depict a network of overland roads, the colony’s mountainous interior made shipping the most practical way to transport goods and people. Nevertheless, the colony’s complex coast was difficult to sail around, and local pirates preyed on Saint-Domingue’s coastal traffic until the 1730s.¹⁷

      There were at least four factors besides geography and buccaneers that kept Saint-Domingue economically two or three decades behind Jamaica. First, Spain recognized French possession of the western coast of Hispaniola only in 1697, in the Treaty of Ryswick. Second, the French navy was ill equipped to protect the kingdom’s transatlantic commerce from foreign enemies or pirates. From a high point of one hundred ships of the line in 1680, it shrank to forty-nine in 1725.¹⁸ Third, the French slave trade started slowly. It was only in 1725, after bitter complaints from wealthy colonists about the Compagnie des Indes, which controlled France’s trade with West Africa, that Versailles opened the slave trade to all private merchants.

      Figure 4. “Carte de l’isle de Saint Domingue. dressée en 1722 pour l’usage du roy, sur les mémoires de Mr. Frezier, ingénieur de S. M. et autres, assujetis aux observations astronomiques, Guillaume Delisle.” Paris, 1780. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.

      The fourth factor was the amount of investment sugar required. Father Labat, a Dominican priest who managed his order’s plantation in Martinique, described the technological and human workings of sugar plantations at the beginning of the eighteenth century in his widely read Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (1724). In a long and detailed chapter that was copied in commercial handbooks, he advocated a workforce of 120 slaves, which he believed in 1696 would produce net annual revenue of 38,030 livres for over a century, with “a little thriftiness.” But when Labat compared such an estate to the cacao walks he observed in Martinique around 1702, he noted that sugar required three times the investment as a cacao estate that produced the same revenues. This comparison, he noted, revealed “that the cacao walk is a rich gold mine, while a sugar estate is only an iron mine.”¹⁹

      About the time Labat’s book was published, a fungal infestation destroyed the cacao sector in Saint-Domingue. But in the first half of the eighteenth century, most aspiring planters turned to indigo rather than sugar. Like sugar, indigo dye must be heavily processed after harvesting. But the indigo plant does not have to be crushed or its juice boiled. Instead, it is soaked in a series of masonry tanks until the dye precipitates into a powder, which is then drained and dried before shipping. Indigo cultivation is labor intensive, and the manufacturing process can be subtle, but it can be handled with less than a dozen slaves, a few water basins, and a skilled refiner. Not only was it cheaper to make than sugar, but indigo was easier to transport and store, which made it better suited for smuggling in parts of the colony where French commercial shipping was rare. Up to the mid-eighteenth century, indigo works in Saint-Domingue outnumbered sugar mills ten to one.²⁰

      Sugar cultivation began in Saint-Domingue in the 1690s. The colony’s first sugar exports to France arrived in 1697. But it was only after the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713 that colonists began to build integrated plantations and to create large slave forces. Only after 1740 did Saint-Domingue reach the level of development Jamaica had attained by 1720. In 1730 it had just over seventy-nine thousand slaves, while in 1734 Jamaica had roughly eighty-six thousand slaves. By 1744, the enslaved population of the larger French colony had surpassed that of its neighbor, with 118,000 slaves compared to roughly 112,000 slaves in Jamaica.²¹ Besides buying African workers, each of whom cost roughly as much as a French silk weaver made in an entire year, Saint-Domingue’s largest sugar planters also invested in new plantation refineries to produce more valuable clayed, rather than brown or muscovado sugar.²² In 1730 the colony had eighteen sucreries en blanc, amounting to only 5 percent of its sugar estates. By 1753 there were 235 of these more elaborate factories, making up 42 percent of all Saint-Domingue sugar estates. In the region around Cap Français, 189 out of 290 sugar refineries (65 percent) produced clayed sugar.²³

      Irrigation was another central element of Saint-Domingue’s transformation after 1730. Before the Revolution, very few irrigation projects were completed in France itself. Most of them ended because of litigation caused by competing or overlapping jurisdictions and property rights. In both Saint-Domingue and France after 1760 the royal state eventually worked to promote irrigation schemes, but before 1760 irrigation works were private projects, involving dozens or even hundreds of planters.²⁴ The first irrigation works were built in 1731 for two plantations in the Cul-de-Sac plain that would one day become the hinterland of Port-au-Prince. In 1737 another system in this region brought water to twenty-four sugar plantations, and after 1739 four plantations shared an irrigation works at Aquin on the southern coast. Other early sugar areas, like the plains around Léogane and Petit Goâve, followed with private irrigation schemes in the 1740s.²⁵ These investments expanded sugar planting into less fertile regions of the colony. They also provided power for water-driven sugar mills, helping make Saint-Domingue into the most efficient producer of tropical commodities