The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

suffered in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue during the period of the Seven Years’ War.

      The narrative section of the book focuses around the three great global wars that transformed the Caribbean in the second half of the eighteenth century. Chapter 4 provides a Caribbean-focused narrative of the Seven Years’ War, which is key to our argument in the book’s most important section, Chapters 5, 6, and 7. These chapters describe the new legal definitions of “whiteness” formulated in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. In the book’s third and final section, Chapters 8, 9, and 10, we describe the results of this transformation in racial thinking and document how the American Revolutionary War shaped life for white colonists and by extension their enslaved property. We conclude just before the start of the final and most momentous global war in the second half of the eighteenth century. This war, lasting from 1789 through to 1815, was occasioned by the French Revolutions and led to the most significant turbulence in the French Antilles since the Columbian Encounter of the early sixteenth century. But when we end, in 1788, that turbulence was ahead of colonists in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue and was largely unimaginable to anyone living in either place.

      Every writer thinks his or her topic of enquiry is especially important. We are no different. We believe that if you are to understand the making of the modern world in the crucial years encompassing the various political and economic revolutions (American, French, Haitian, and Industrial) that transformed Western and then global society in the second half of the eighteenth century, then what happened in Saint-Domingue and Jamaica between 1748 and 1788 cannot be ignored. They were examples of success in the modern world, in that the plantation machine was a fundamental step forward in the organization of labor for the enrichment of the fortunate owners of large-scale enterprises. The plantation was a great success because it was a precursor to the industrial factory in its management of labor, its harvesting of resources, and its scale of capital investment and output.⁴⁷ As the preceding quote from Abbé Raynal illustrates, contemporaries were well aware of how the economic potential of the plantation system, including its methods of management and economic organization, made places like Jamaica and Saint-Domingue extremely valuable imperial possessions. They were also geopolitically significant, and imperial officials devoted large resources to defending them. In the American Revolution, for example, keeping Jamaica safe from French attack was so important that Britain compromised the defense of its American mainland possessions by withdrawing its navy from the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 in order to send it southward. Saint-Domingue was even more important geopolitically to France, as shown by its expenditure of vast amounts of money and huge reserves of well-trained European soldiers during the calamitous (for the French, anyway) Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804 in an ultimately fruitless campaign to restore slavery and the plantation system in its former Greater Antillean “jewel.”⁴⁸ Haitians remembered how they had humiliated the French. One of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s officers attended patriotic plays celebrating Haitian independence wearing a large hat on which was written, in large red letters, “Haiti, the tomb of the French.” The French remembered their humiliation also, inflicting on Haiti in 1825 an enormous and crippling indemnity of 150 million francs for the privilege of engaging in international trade.⁴⁹

      The significance of these remarkably successful and terrifyingly brutal slave societies is increasingly recognized in an Atlantic-inflected historiography in which Jamaica and Saint-Domingue are seen not just as important within Caribbean and American history but as vital parts of eighteenth-century British and French imperial history. As authors with a long-standing interest in the history of the Greater Antilles, we have watched how over the last twenty years the history of this part of the world and the story of the plantation machine has moved from the margins of historical interest to become a more central component of the story of how the modern world came into being.⁵⁰ We believe that our cautious approach to the importance of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue to French and British social, political, and economic development in the second half of the eighteenth century allows for a defensible appreciation of the links between Caribbean slavery and European industrialism. Wealth from Jamaica proved beneficial to Britain, enhancing manufacturing and urbanization, and providing an impetus to Britain’s powerful mercantile class. So too wealth from Saint-Domingue helped move French eighteenth-century merchant capitalism toward industrialism, though the American and French Revolutions delayed and shaped this process.⁵¹ Exports from Britain to the Americas made a powerful contribution to British economic growth, although the most significant area to contribute to British wealth was not West Indian slave societies as much as the northern mainland colonies in which growing European populations stimulated demand for British manufactures.⁵² In the absence of slave colonies, the northern colonies may still have imported similar quantities of British manufactures, but the existence of places like Jamaica allowed northern merchants to acquire the finance necessary to buy British goods through money gained in trade with West Indian colonies.

      The wealth derived from Jamaica was significant in other ways. A few Jamaican politicians, notably William Beckford II, who was an intimate of William Pitt the elder, were able to influence British politics in respect to the governance of Atlantic colonies.⁵³ But Jamaica was most important to Britain as a source of wealth and prestige for a substantial portion of Britain’s ruling elite and as an incubator of culturally important institutions that helped define Britain as a nation. Jamaican money and Jamaican planters who were resident in Britain, especially in southeastern England, altered consumption patterns and changed cultural practices, particularly in regard to house building, connoisseurship, and philanthropy.⁵⁴ In addition, the enslaved and free people of color that Jamaicans brought with them into Britain altered irrevocably, as we discuss in later chapters of this book, the character of British race relations, just as they also did in France. Indeed, Britons’ self-conception of themselves as modern people, living in diverse societies, hinged, as Kathleen Wilson has argued, on a developing historical consciousness shaped by contact and exchange in the metropolis between Britons and people of African descent brought in by Jamaican planters.⁵⁵

      Less work has been done on the contribution of planters in the French Caribbean to France in the late eighteenth century, with Atlantic history relatively marginalized within French historiography. Moreover, the collapse of Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution has tended to hide the dynamic influence of wealthy planters in French commerce and social life prior to the French Revolution.⁵⁶ But some recent work has shown that, as in Britain, the wealth of the Antilles in the second half of the eighteenth century penetrated into the highest reaches of French society, notably in the port towns of Bordeaux and Nantes and into the financial and political capital of Paris. French metropolitan investment in the Antilles was even more extensive than in Britain, with large merchant houses such as the Chaurands in Nantes investing 3 million livres tournois into West Indian planters.⁵⁷ They were backed up by leading Parisian banks, which saw investment in Saint-Domingue as potentially lucrative. Caribbean planters made a sizeable contribution to France, with imperial products amounting to as much as 15 percent of overall economic growth in France during the expansionary years between 1716 and 1787.⁵⁸ Much of this money ended up in Paris, which in the eighteenth century was transformed from an administrative and manufacturing city into a financial powerhouse. Money flooded into the capital from everywhere in France and also from Saint-Domingue. For example, in the 1770s, Jean-Joseph de Laborde, the wealthiest man in France, invested heavily in Saint-Domingue, after retiring from court finance and rebuilding the La Grange-Batelière district of Paris into a stylish quartier. Laborde spent 1.2 million livres to acquire a collection of contiguous plantations, and 750,000 livres as his share of a complex irrigation system in the region. He populated his estates with thousands of captives, many of whom traveled from Africa on his slave ships. By 1789 his estates had fourteen hundred enslaved workers.⁵⁹

      As the French metropolis became increasingly