recovery after 1763. Saint-Domingue became too successful for its own good. Whether the growth of Saint-Domingue would have continued if the French Revolution had not occurred is the subject of debate.45 What is undeniable, however, is that the consequences of metropolitan and internal challenges to white planter dominance in the 1790s were more dramatic than in Jamaica. Saint-Domingue became Haiti by the early nineteenth century. It was by then a radically different place than before. Jamaica remained Jamaica, even if diminished in wealth and importance.46 What we hope readers will gain from the twinned histories of these two eighteenth-century colonies is that Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were at the forefront of social, economic, and political development in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. How they developed, and how they prospered, in the period between the Seven Years’ War and the start of the French Revolution was not incidental but central to the nature of French and British imperialism in the New World and in imperial settings generally.
This introduction has outlined the major themes we explore in this work. But it might be worth briefly outlining the plan of what follows. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 set out the background necessary to understand the peculiar societies of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, places that seem as strange to modern readers as they were to European contemporaries. These chapters describe the most salient features of each society, focusing on the plantation and the town. They provide some glimpses into what colonists experienced and what Africans suffered in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue during the period of the Seven Years’ War.
The narrative section of the book focuses around the three great global wars that transformed the Caribbean in the second half of the eighteenth century. Chapter 4 provides a Caribbean-focused narrative of the Seven Years’ War, which is key to our argument in the book’s most important section, Chapters 5, 6, and 7. These chapters describe the new legal definitions of “whiteness” formulated in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. In the book’s third and final section, Chapters 8, 9, and 10, we describe the results of this transformation in racial thinking and document how the American Revolutionary War shaped life for white colonists and by extension their enslaved property. We conclude just before the start of the final and most momentous global war in the second half of the eighteenth century. This war, lasting from 1789 through to 1815, was occasioned by the French Revolutions and led to the most significant turbulence in the French Antilles since the Columbian Encounter of the early sixteenth century. But when we end, in 1788, that turbulence was ahead of colonists in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue and was largely unimaginable to anyone living in either place.
Every writer thinks his or her topic of enquiry is especially important. We are no different. We believe that if you are to understand the making of the modern world in the crucial years encompassing the various political and economic revolutions (American, French, Haitian, and Industrial) that transformed Western and then global society in the second half of the eighteenth century, then what happened in Saint-Domingue and Jamaica between 1748 and 1788 cannot be ignored. They were examples of success in the modern world, in that the plantation machine was a fundamental step forward in the organization of labor for the enrichment of the fortunate owners of large-scale enterprises. The plantation was a great success because it was a precursor to the industrial factory in its management of labor, its harvesting of resources, and its scale of capital investment and output.47 As the preceding quote from Abbé Raynal illustrates, contemporaries were well aware of how the economic potential of the plantation system, including its methods of management and economic organization, made places like Jamaica and Saint-Domingue extremely valuable imperial possessions. They were also geopolitically significant, and imperial officials devoted large resources to defending them. In the American Revolution, for example, keeping Jamaica safe from French attack was so important that Britain compromised the defense of its American mainland possessions by withdrawing its navy from the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 in order to send it southward. Saint-Domingue was even more important geopolitically to France, as shown by its expenditure of vast amounts of money and huge reserves of well-trained European soldiers during the calamitous (for the French, anyway) Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804 in an ultimately fruitless campaign to restore slavery and the plantation system in its former Greater Antillean “jewel.”48 Haitians remembered how they had humiliated the French. One of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s officers attended patriotic plays celebrating Haitian independence wearing a large hat on which was written, in large red letters, “Haiti, the tomb of the French.” The French remembered their humiliation also, inflicting on Haiti in 1825 an enormous and crippling indemnity of 150 million francs for the privilege of engaging in international trade.49
The significance of these remarkably successful and terrifyingly brutal slave societies is increasingly recognized in an Atlantic-inflected historiography in which Jamaica and Saint-Domingue are seen not just as important within Caribbean and American history but as vital parts of eighteenth-century British and French imperial history. As authors with a long-standing interest in the history of the Greater Antilles, we have watched how over the last twenty years the history of this part of the world and the story of the plantation machine has moved from the margins of historical interest to become a more central component of the story of how the modern world came into being.50 We believe that our cautious approach to the importance of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue to French and British social, political, and economic development in the second half of the eighteenth century allows for a defensible appreciation of the links between Caribbean slavery and European industrialism. Wealth from Jamaica proved beneficial to Britain, enhancing manufacturing and urbanization, and providing an impetus to Britain’s powerful mercantile class. So too wealth from Saint-Domingue helped move French eighteenth-century merchant capitalism toward industrialism, though the American and French Revolutions delayed and shaped this process.51 Exports from Britain to the Americas made a powerful contribution to British economic growth, although the most significant area to contribute to British wealth was not West Indian slave societies as much as the northern mainland colonies in which growing European populations stimulated demand for British manufactures.52 In the absence of slave colonies, the northern colonies may still have imported similar quantities of British manufactures, but the existence of places like Jamaica allowed northern merchants to acquire the finance necessary to buy British goods through money gained in trade with West Indian colonies.
The wealth derived from Jamaica was significant in other ways. A few Jamaican politicians, notably William Beckford II, who was an intimate of William Pitt the elder, were able to influence British politics in respect to the governance of Atlantic colonies.53 But Jamaica was most important to Britain as a source of wealth and prestige for a substantial portion of Britain’s ruling elite and as an incubator of culturally important institutions that helped define Britain as a nation. Jamaican money and Jamaican planters who were resident in Britain, especially in southeastern England, altered consumption patterns and changed cultural practices, particularly in regard to house building, connoisseurship, and philanthropy.54 In addition, the enslaved and free people of color that Jamaicans brought with them into Britain altered irrevocably, as we discuss in later chapters of this book, the character of British race relations, just as they also did in France. Indeed, Britons’ self-conception of themselves as modern people, living in diverse societies, hinged, as Kathleen Wilson has argued, on a developing historical consciousness shaped by contact and exchange in the metropolis between Britons and people of African descent brought in by Jamaican planters.55
Less work has been done on the contribution of planters in the French Caribbean to France in the late
