The Haitian Revolution

By the 1780s, the French colony of The western third of the island of Hispaniola, colonized by France beginning in the mid-1600s. By the late eighteenth century it was the most profitable colony in the world, producing roughly 40 percent of Europe's sugar and 60 percent of its coffee — all of it extracted through the labor of half a million enslaved Africans. produced more exportable wealth than any other colony in the Americas. Sugar, coffee, indigo, cotton. The numbers were staggering: Saint-Domingue supplied roughly 40 percent of Europe's sugar and over half its coffee. The colony alone generated more trade revenue than all thirteen American states combined.

This wealth was built on a specific kind of violence. Approximately 500,000 enslaved Africans worked the plantations. The mortality rate was so extreme that the colony required constant importation of new captives from West and Central Africa just to maintain the labor force. An enslaved person arriving in Saint-Domingue had an average life expectancy of seven years. Whipping, branding, mutilation, and murder were routine disciplinary tools codified in the Code Noir but often exceeded in practice. Planters poured boiling sugar cane juice on workers who collapsed. They buried people alive for minor infractions.

The Haitian Revolution was not a single uprising. It was at least three overlapping conflicts driven by three distinct groups, each with different grievances and objectives.