colonies, like Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, shared more physical characteristics with each other than with Lesser Antilles colonies within the same empire. Barbados, for example, was the island most often linked to Jamaica in the eighteenth century; both colonies had a sugar plantation economy, a society built around slavery, and a prominent place in the British Empire. Nevertheless, there were stark differences between the two places. Barbados was physically much smaller, had a larger and more settled white population, and, most important, was the sole British sugar colony to experience natural increase in its slave population before slavery was abolished in 1834. It is as appropriate to compare Barbados with Virginia or South Carolina as it is to look at what it shared with Jamaica.20 A similar argument can be made in regard to comparing Martinique to Saint-Domingue. This Lesser Antilles colony was less than one-twentieth the size of Saint-Domingue and after 1750 no longer received significant numbers of European or African newcomers. The two colonies were thus very different from each other.
Jamaica and Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century resembled each other in being societies in which economic success for the few was matched by grotesque poverty for the majority. Both islands were charnel houses in which neither the white nor black population was demographically self-sustaining. Consequently, on both islands the population structure was peculiarly skewed toward recent migrants from either Africa or Europe. Adults between twenty and forty years old were a disproportionate presence while young and old people were comparatively absent. White men greatly outnumbered white women, but the great majority of the population was of African descent. Culturally, these colonies were extensions of Africa in the New World, despite whites’ political and social control. The men and women who flourished in these places were profoundly shaped by the experience of death. European visitors were either horrified or exhilarated by colonists’ lack of restraint, moderation, and deference. Saint-Domingue may have been French, and Jamaica may have been British, but they were remarkably similar in cultural terms, as observers to both societies noted.
In 1733 the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Le Pers described Saint-Domingue’s creoles (native-born whites) as differing markedly from the metropolitan French in personality and even in physique. He noted that “They are commonly well-built and easy going, though somewhat flighty and inconstant. They are frank, energetic, proud, haughty, presumptuous, [and] intrepid; in religious matters they are criticized for having very little aptitude and much indulgence but we have seen that a good upbringing easily corrects most of their faults.”21 At the end of the century, Moreau de Saint-Méry described Saint-Domingue’s island-born whites as having “a host of admirable qualities; frank, good natured, generous, perhaps ostentatiously, confident, brave, steadfast friends and good fathers, they are exempt from the crimes that degrade humanity.”22 Both writers identified hospitality as the principal virtue of Saint-Domingue whites.
These descriptions were strikingly similar to the portrait of the Jamaican planter made by Edward Long, the foremost mid-eighteenth-century historian of Jamaica. Long’s Jamaican planters were “of quick apprehension, brave, good-natured, affable, generous, temperate, and sober … lovers of freedom … tender fathers, humane and indulgent masters, firm and sincere friends.” They were notorious for their abundant hospitality, to friends and strangers alike, and celebrated for their devotion to “gaiety and diversions.” It is an attractive portrait. Even planter faults—Long declared them indulgent, heavy drinkers, poor economists, notoriously fickle and desultory in their pursuits, and addicted to both venery and also conspicuous consumption—point them out as agreeable companions. The faults and virtues that Long discerned in white women in Jamaica—their fidelity, good looks, chastity, modesty, and fondness of dancing, music, and other female genteel pursuits being virtues, and their overindulgence of children, ignorance and lack of education, and over familiarity with enslaved female domestics being principal defects—were similarly echoed by propagandists in Saint-Domingue.23
Long and Moreau were, of course, determined to put a positive spin on the character of white settlers on the two islands. But less favorable modern accounts also suggest that the similarities between Frenchmen and Britons in the tropics were more significant than the differences. The brutality of the Jamaican slave overseer Thomas Thistlewood, whose life can be chronicled in some detail, is matched by the savagery toward enslaved people of Nicholas Lejeune in Saint-Domingue, whose defiant defense of his inexcusable behavior toward slave women, examined in Chapter 10, laid bare the absolute power of white masters on Caribbean sugar plantations. The psychologies of such men were shaped by the nature of the societies in which they lived. Underneath the surface shimmer of civil institutions, routinized hospitality, and the languid sensuality of colonial life, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were societies at war. A free population that was outnumbered ten to one by enslaved people had to establish its authority through arbitrary and brutal measures. The ethos of these societies was a peculiar combination of libertinism and authoritarianism, in which the authority of masters over slaves was frequently greater than the power of the imperial state and its legal institutions. Oppressors and victims lived in uneasy tension, which on occasion exploded into open and violent resistance, as in Tacky’s 1760 revolt in Jamaica, and in the hysteria surrounding the poisoning campaign allegedly undertaken by the escapee Macandal in 1757 in Saint-Domingue. Just as hurricanes, the most feared feature of the West Indian environment, could destroy everything in their path, so too the white colonists of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue lived on the edge of a social hurricane. Slave revolts could be as deadly in their implications for white society as hurricanes were for the physical landscape.
Comparative history has not been a feature of scholarship on the Caribbean since the 1980s, but a couple of important lessons emerged from those earlier works. One is the danger of writing a comparative study without a deep immersion in the archives, which in practical terms makes coauthorship necessary. The material conditions of plantation life, in particular the mortality rates of enslaved workers, show a similarity among sugar plantation colonies that overrides many of the apparent legal and cultural differences.24 Political, religious, legal, and other cultural differences shaped the lives of enslaved and free people, but we cannot reliably judge those influences until we understand the material conditions of transportation, nutrition, work, and illness. For this reason a comparison of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica helps us understand how geography constrained and liberated development on both islands and meant that there would always be significant differences between them. These differences will emerge several times in this joint portrait.
Saint-Domingue and Jamaica occupied similar positions within their respective empires because of the way each was different from older Lesser Antilles colonies. English planters developed the integrated plantation model in the 1660s in Barbados. It spread gradually to French Martinique, where planters adapted it as the principal mode of social and economic organization. But the amount of land available in the Greater Antilles provided the optimal scale for eighteenth-century sugar technology. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were each twenty-five times the size of Barbados and Martinique, respectively, the Lesser Antilles colonies to which they were most frequently compared. These smaller islands are located where the Atlantic trade winds enter the Caribbean Sea, so for sailing ships they were closer to Europe and Africa than Jamaica or Saint-Domingue. The location of the Greater Antilles, however, gave them easier communication with the North American mainland. Within their respective empires, the two Greater Antilles colonies developed considerably later than their smaller counterparts. By the early 1670s, Barbados was as settled as southern England. Governor Sir Jonathan Atkins declared that “there was not a foot of land in Barbados that is not employed even to the very seaside.” Visitors thought that it looked like one continuous green garden.25 By contrast, Jamaica in this period was barely inhabited. French Martinique, founded in 1635, had definitively shifted to sugar by 1669, when two-thirds of all arable land was owned by sugar planters.26 Saint-Domingue’s sugar “take-off” occurred only between 1715 and 1748. At the turn of the seventeenth century, when Barbados and Martinique were looking like fully settled islands, Saint-Domingue was still mostly a wilderness.
Despite these similarities in geography and in settlement patterns, there were important differences in
