The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

Allan Potofsky has detailed how Jean-Baptiste Hotten (1741–1802) used his profits from his large sugar estate with 219 enslaved laborers to become a Parisian real estate mogul. The son of a Bordelais sugar merchant, Hotten was unusual in carrying little debt at a time when private and public debt was spiraling out of control. This strong financial position allowed him to splurge on Paris real estate, constructing an elaborate complex in northwest Paris, consisting of a hôtel particulier, rental homes, and a large private garden. Interestingly, he continued his purchases well into the 1790s, showing that Caribbean planters were not left as destitute by the Haitian Revolution as they pretended.⁶⁰

      Hotten’s prosperity in France, at least until he died violently during an ill-advised return to the colony, shows that we should not base our judgments about late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue on Haiti’s later history. We know what contemporaries did not, namely that in a few short years after the late 1780s Saint-Domingue society would explode into the revolutionary conflagration that led to the creation of the first independent nation in the Western Hemisphere led by people of African ancestry. The situation in Jamaica in the late 1780s and 1790s was not so dramatic. Indeed, the destruction of Saint-Domingue proved a boon to Jamaica, which profited from the economic vacuum created by the Haitian Revolution. In the 1790s it enjoyed a prolonged if unsustainable boom in sugar production and slave importation that few would have predicted a decade previously. But Jamaica faced long-term problems after the 1780s, mostly initiated from actions taken in the metropolis, all of which were designed, in the minds of proslavery Jamaicans, to undermine an immensely productive plantation system. They thought it “madness.”⁶¹ Unlike Saint-Domingue, Jamaica’s slide from great wealth and geopolitical importance happened gradually, occasioned by the growing power of a force that Jamaican planters barely recognized before 1788—abolitionists campaigning for the end of the slave trade and, by the 1820s, for the abolition of slavery itself.

      We ask readers to try and forget what they know is going to happen to these two colonies. After 1788 each confronted an unusual combination of outside events and revolutionary movements that transformed not just the Greater Antilles but also the Atlantic World. To describe these transformations is beyond the scope of this book. But we will show that in 1788 neither Jamaica nor Saint-Domingue were disasters waiting to happen, as an earlier generation of historians suggested. Rather, they were remarkable economic successes and considerable contributors to imperial wealth in the dramatic years between the start of the Seven Years’ War and the calling of the French Estates General in 1788. In Jamaica, the travails of the American Revolutionary years and the multiple hurricanes that afflicted the island from 1780 to 1786 had ended by 1788. The slave trade had started to flow again; plantation profits were once again buoyant; and productivity gains on plantations were making slavery ever more efficient, but just as deadly to workers as before. Britain remained strongly committed to Jamaica as the centerpiece of its British Atlantic strategy. By any standard except one Jamaica was doing very well.⁶² The exceptional standard was Saint-Domingue. By 1788, Saint-Domingue’s culture of relentless slave exploitation and highly capitalized agro-industry had been bolstered by a doubling and tripling of the French trade in African slaves, making it the most valuable colonial territory on earth.

      The French government, even more than the British government in Jamaica, recognized Saint-Domingue’s importance and devoted ever increasing resources to its protection and development. It gave beneficial terms to slave traders and spent massive sums on rebuilding its navy. The results were remarkable. Atlantic trade for the first time in French history challenged trade to the Mediterranean as the dominant sector in French commerce. But the costs of catering to the growth of Saint-Domingue were considerable. As William Doyle notes, it is not “a complete exaggeration to suggest that the costs of upholding a colonial system that could only work through slavery were what ultimately brought down the ancien régime in France.”⁶³

      The remarkable economic success of these two colonies was acknowledged, eagerly welcomed, and sometimes resented in Europe because of the relentless materialism of both societies. The last point became more salient over time. Metropolitan observers increasingly felt that the white residents of these societies were morally deficient in their attachment to material gain, their indifference and sometimes hostility to traditional values, and, most of all, their shortsighted and seemingly un-European exploitation of their servile laborers. It was not the economics of slavery, but the cultural practices that were associated with the institution, that caused most concern in France and Britain. We can see these practices in a close examination of society and economy in the two colonies. We turn to this examination now.

      CHAPTER 2

      The Plantation World

      Eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue and Jamaica were difficult societies for contemporaries to comprehend. Amazingly profitable and extraordinarily brutal, they were afflicted by horrific rates of disease and death, not only among enslaved peoples but also among their ruling elites. Death defined the peculiar cultural ambience of each place better than anything else.¹ Free residents seemed addicted to the fervent pursuit of pleasure as well as money in ways that fascinated but also unnerved observers coming from North America or Europe. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, for example, the author of the iconic text on American identity, Letters from an American Farmer, found Jamaica impossible to place in his schema of American development. Crèvecoeur, who appears to have visited Jamaica in the 1780s, understood the cruelties inherent in the plantation slavery that sustained societies from Virginia to northern Brazil and believed this system was deeply irrational.² Nevertheless, Jamaica disturbed him in ways that Spanish America—which he saw as lethargic, indolent, superstitious, and backward—did not. Jamaica’s essential characteristics, he thought, were restless wandering, corruption, and pervasive dishonesty.

      He noted Jamaica’s “great Glare of Richesses.” He was “shocked at that perpetual Collision & Combination of Crimes & Profligacy which I observed there.” He noted the “severity Exercised agt ye Negroes” and lamented the illicit sexuality that raised some black females to a “Pomp” from “which the rest were reduced” and that was derived from “a perversion of appetites.” In a place with no religion “save few Temples,” everything was sacrificed to business and sensuality. He lamented that “a perpetual pursuit of Gain & Pleasures seem’d to be the idol of the Island.” Jamaica was “a Chaos of Men Negroes & things which made my Young American head Giddy.” Fighting his way “through this obnoxious Crowd,” the innocent narrator reflected that “the Island itself looked like a Great Gulph, perpetually absorbing Men by the power of Elementary Heat, of Intemperance by the force of every Excess” so that “Life resembled a Delirium Inspired by the warmth of the sun urging every Passion & desire to some premature Extreme.” His only response to these extremes, to the “Exhausting Climate,” and to “the perpetual struggle subsisting between the two great factions which Inhabit this Island,” was to take leave of Jamaica and not think about it again.³

      Travelers to Saint-Domingue were similarly dislocated. Colonists there were highly materialistic, and had few communal institutions or spaces that were reminiscent of France. Isolated on their estates, many colonists adopted the customs of the buccaneers that preceded them and the enslaved Africans that surrounded them. It was a place that seemed at one and the same time to be very French and also the least French place imaginable. The colony inspired both desire and disgust in Alexandre-Stanislas de Wimpffen, a minor nobleman who sought his fortune there in the late 1780s. He was entranced, on the one hand, by the colonial landscape and by beautiful “mulâtresses” who “combine the explosiveness of saltpeter with an exuberance of desire, that scorning all, drives them to pursue, acquire and nourish pleasure.” But he saw Saint-Domingue as a world turned upside down, where morality was absent, mainly owing to slavery. It was a society based on pursuit of profit, not religious virtue, social cohesion, or imperial loyalty. He proclaimed, “The Commerce of France is the true owner of Saint-Domingue.”⁴ Lieutenant Colonel Desdorides, stationed in Saint-Domingue in 1779, was also struck by colonists’ pursuit of profit and pleasure. He lamented that “it seems that in Saint-Domingue violent agitations of the heart