Saint-Domingue: France's Richest Colony

In 1789 the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, on the western part of the island of Hispaniola, was one of the most profitable colonies in the world. Its plantations produced a large share of the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe, and the wealth generated there supported French ports such as Bordeaux and Nantes. That wealth rested on slavery.

Around 1789 the colony held roughly half a million enslaved people, most of them born in Africa, alongside about 30,000 white colonists and a similar number of free people of colour, many of whom owned property. Conditions on sugar plantations were brutal and mortality was high, so planters relied on a constant traffic of newly enslaved Africans. Society was divided by race and status as well as wealth. When the Revolution proclaimed universal rights in Paris, every group in Saint-Domingue interpreted those words according to its own interests.