Saint-Domingue: The Most Profitable Colony

To compare the Haitian Revolution with others, students must first understand Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the western third of Hispaniola. By the 1780s it was the most profitable colony in the Americas, producing a large share of the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe. That wealth rested on slavery: around 1789 roughly 500,000 enslaved people lived there, compared with about 30,000 white colonists and a similar number of free people of color.

Because the plantation system worked many people to death, planters imported tens of thousands of captives from Africa each year, so most enslaved people had been born in Africa. Society was divided not only by slavery but by legal distinctions between wealthy white planters, poorer whites and free people of color, some of whom owned plantations themselves. These divisions mattered when the French Revolution's news arrived in 1789.