outnumbered sugar mills ten to one.20
Sugar cultivation began in Saint-Domingue in the 1690s. The colony’s first sugar exports to France arrived in 1697. But it was only after the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713 that colonists began to build integrated plantations and to create large slave forces. Only after 1740 did Saint-Domingue reach the level of development Jamaica had attained by 1720. In 1730 it had just over seventy-nine thousand slaves, while in 1734 Jamaica had roughly eighty-six thousand slaves. By 1744, the enslaved population of the larger French colony had surpassed that of its neighbor, with 118,000 slaves compared to roughly 112,000 slaves in Jamaica.21 Besides buying African workers, each of whom cost roughly as much as a French silk weaver made in an entire year, Saint-Domingue’s largest sugar planters also invested in new plantation refineries to produce more valuable clayed, rather than brown or muscovado sugar.22 In 1730 the colony had eighteen sucreries en blanc, amounting to only 5 percent of its sugar estates. By 1753 there were 235 of these more elaborate factories, making up 42 percent of all Saint-Domingue sugar estates. In the region around Cap Français, 189 out of 290 sugar refineries (65 percent) produced clayed sugar.23
Irrigation was another central element of Saint-Domingue’s transformation after 1730. Before the Revolution, very few irrigation projects were completed in France itself. Most of them ended because of litigation caused by competing or overlapping jurisdictions and property rights. In both Saint-Domingue and France after 1760 the royal state eventually worked to promote irrigation schemes, but before 1760 irrigation works were private projects, involving dozens or even hundreds of planters.24 The first irrigation works were built in 1731 for two plantations in the Cul-de-Sac plain that would one day become the hinterland of Port-au-Prince. In 1737 another system in this region brought water to twenty-four sugar plantations, and after 1739 four plantations shared an irrigation works at Aquin on the southern coast. Other early sugar areas, like the plains around Léogane and Petit Goâve, followed with private irrigation schemes in the 1740s.25 These investments expanded sugar planting into less fertile regions of the colony. They also provided power for water-driven sugar mills, helping make Saint-Domingue into the most efficient producer of tropical commodities in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic World. In the 1740s, as Saint-Domingue’s slave imports and sugar estates continued to grow, a new plantation crop emerged. Coffee, first planted in Saint-Domingue in 1738, thrived on hillsides that would not support indigo or sugarcane. In 1753 administrators counted nearly thirteen million coffee bushes. Moreover, the colony’s overall population nearly doubled, increasing 86 percent from 1730 to 1753, almost entirely because of the accelerating importation of enslaved Africans. In 1753 Saint-Domingue had 161,859 slaves, a number well above Jamaica’s slave population of 106,592 in 1752.26
The nature of port records and other primary sources in this prestatistical age make it difficult to assess what Saint-Domingue’s total plantation exports might have been at midcentury. But it is clear that production from France’s largest Caribbean colony had caught and probably surpassed that of Jamaica and perhaps that of the entire British West Indies. Charles Frostin estimates that in 1740 Saint-Domingue’s sugar production of forty thousand tons surpassed that of the whole British Caribbean production of thirty-five thousand tons the same year.27
Because the sugar plantation was the emblematic feature of the landscape in both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, by the last decades of the eighteenth century the wealthiest owners of these estates wanted to see images of the properties that supported them. In the 1770s, William Beckford, the wealthiest man in Jamaica, commissioned George Robertson (1735–1821) to paint views of Beckford’s Westmoreland sugar estates. Four of Robertson’s landscapes were popular enough that John Boydell made them into copperplate engravings in 1778. All four of the paintings featured tropical vegetation with rushing rivers in the foreground, with black men or women washing, fishing, or tending animals. One showed Beckford’s Fort William estate in the background with the Roaring River in the foreground (Figure 5). Robertson drew Beckford’s sugar works, and above it, on a hill, the planter’s residence. Smoke rises from the boiling house, suggesting a proto-industrial estate, but, in the twilight scene, the enslaved blacks with their baskets and livestock look more like exotic peasants than mill workers. In the center of the image, Beckford’s large white house dominated. Robertson thus suggests that the planter has successfully tamed not only the wild Jamaican landscape but also alien African workers.
Figure 5. “A View in the Island of Jamaica, of Fort William Estate, with Part of Roaring River, belonging to William Beckford, Esqr. Near Savannah La Marr, Westmoreland, 1778,” drawn on the spot by George Robertson, engraved by Thomas Vivares. © Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.
All mid-eighteenth-century British America plantation societies entered into a prolonged period of affluence that lasted from around the 1730s until the end of the Seven Years’ War, as they also did in the French Antilles.28 Boydell’s engraving of Robertson’s painting reflects that prosperity. Profits in the West Indies, however, were far greater than those in the southern colonies of British North America. From the 1740s through to the mid-1770s, British West Indian returns on capital were over 10 percent per annum, reflecting the efficiencies of the integrated plantation model.29 Jamaica became the leading exporter of sugar in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Productivity was extraordinarily high. Between 1750, when per capita productivity per annum based on both the white and the black population was around £8 sterling, and 1800, when per capita productivity per annum was £29.2, or 675 livres, Jamaican productivity expanded to reach probably its natural limits. The Jamaican economy performed strongly not only in comparison with other plantation economies but also relative to emerging industrial nations. On the eve of the American Revolution, when individual wealth (if not productivity) probably peaked, Jamaica was as important to Britain in terms of wealth creation as a large British county.30 Saint-Domingue may have exceeded it in average wealth, but we do not have the figures to justify this assertion. Jamaican sugar planters were among the most accomplished capitalists of their time. Today we see them as ruthlessly using and discarding hundreds of thousands of men and women of African descent. But contemporaries viewed them as entrepreneurs who successfully manipulated a complex agro-industrial technology, supplying their compatriots with a highly desirable product at an ever cheaper price. Their activities were the lynchpin of an Atlantic trade network, linking Africa and Europe with the Caribbean.31
Jamaica’s sugar plantations increased in number from approximately 150 in 1700 to 775 in 1774. Sugar output increased from five thousand tons in 1700, to sixteen thousand tons by 1734, twenty thousand tons in 1754 and to forty thousand tons by 1774. At the same time total exports, of which somewhat over half were sugar exports, increased nearly eight-fold between 1700 and 1774, from £325,000 in 1700 to £1,025,000 in 1750 and £2,400,000 (or 55 million livres) in 1774.32 Sugar was produced by industrial-sized plantation units, customarily containing between 150 and 300 enslaved persons. Such labor forces were the largest in British America, far larger than the crews of around fifty slaves that worked large tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake and the slightly larger forces that labored on rice plantations in South Carolina.33
From the mid-1740s, Jamaica entered into an explosive period of growth. The establishment of peace with the Maroons (independent communities of people of African descent living in the Jamaican interior who from the early eighteenth century fought a twenty-year war against the British government) in 1739 allowed sugar planting to expand into the northwestern parishes of St. James and Hanover as well as into the eastern parish of St. Thomas-in-the-East. It is noteworthy that these years saw only very slow white population growth. The number of whites barely increased in the disease-ridden years between the earthquake at Port Royal in 1690s and the start of the American Revolution. The only firm figures we have are that there were 7,768 whites in 1673 and 8,230 in 1730 and probably no more than ten thousand by the start of the Seven Years’ War. In 1774, a census, most of the details
