hungrily gobbled up what was once frontier land. As planters gained control over the land, so they tightened their control of labor. The trade in African slaves steadily increased as the century progressed, and the common scene of slave ships unloading their human cargoes turned on its head in the most graphic of ways earlier dreams of a “masterless” existence. By century’s end, the fluid pre-plantation economy and society had long since given way to an ominous landscape of imperial soldiers and warships, plantations and sugar mills, masters and slaves.1
Even during such a period of advance and consolidation, however, planters and merchants encountered pockets of resistance to their drive for absolute authority. In fact, employers on both sides of the Atlantic, though flushed with economic prosperity, still worried about the many ways which individuals and groups found to protect and extend masterless existences. In both the Old World and the New, these concerns centered upon the persistent problem of the “seething mobility” of substantial sectors of the laboring classes. In eighteenth-century England, according to E. P. Thompson, masters of labor complained about bothersome aspects of the developing “free” labor market—about “the indiscipline of working people, their lack of economic dependency and their social insubordination”—which resulted from labor’s mobility.2 Planters echoed similar concerns in the Caribbean region, where buccaneers and pirates, the old scourges of the planters and traders, had been effectively suppressed, but where a colorful assortment of saucy and insubordinate characters continued to move about and resist authority. Masters and employers in industrializing Old World economies based on “free” labor felt only mildly threatened by such mobility. In the plantation-based societies of the Caribbean, however, where the unfreedom of the vast majority of the labor force was written into law and sanctioned by force and where “free” workers were the anomaly rather than the rule, the persistence of labor mobility called forth an anguished response from the ruling class. For the same reasons, the prospect of a masterless, mobile existence outside the plantation orbit held an especially seductive appeal for disenchanted people casting about for new options. In England, masters begrudged a certain amount of uncontrolled movement among their workers. In the Caribbean, masters resorted to a profusion of local laws and international treaties to keep this mobility within the narrowest of possible limits.
Though the planters’ efforts to curtail freedom over the course of the eighteenth century placed severe restrictions on mobility, these measures never succeeded completely in keeping people from pursuing alternatives to life under the plantation system. At the close of the eighteenth century, as at its beginning, people of many descriptions defied the odds and attempted to escape their masters. Slaves deserted plantations in large numbers; urban workers ducked their owners; seamen jumped ship to avoid floggings and the press gang; militiamen and regular troops grumbled, ignored orders, and deserted their watch; “higglers” left workplaces to peddle their wares in the black market; and smugglers and shady foreigners moved about on mysterious missions from island to island. Furthermore, the very commercial growth which planters and merchants welcomed opened new avenues of mobility. Cities grew and matured, attracting runaway slaves and sheltering a teeming underground with surprising regional connections. Expanding commercial links sanctioned the comings and goings of ships of all sizes and nations. Island ports required pilot boats with experienced navigators to guide the incoming merchantmen to safe anchorages, and they needed a network of coastal vessels and skilled sailors to support their busy markets. This web of commerce brought the region’s islands into closer and closer contact as the century progressed, providing channels of communication as well as tempting routes of escape.
On the eve of Caribbean revolution, most English, French, and Spanish planters and traders in the region rode the crest of a long wave of prosperity. Nevertheless, they continued to grope, much as they had at the end of the last century, for common solutions to the problem of controlling runaways, deserters, and vagabonds in the region. As long as masterless men and women found ways to move about and evade the authorities, they reasoned, these people embodied submerged traditions of popular resistance which could burst into the open at any time. Examining the rich world which these mobile fugitives inhabited—the complex (and largely invisible) underground which the “mariners, renegades, and castaways” of the Caribbean created to protect themselves in the face of planter consolidation—is crucial to understanding how news, ideas, and social excitement traveled in the electric political environment of the late eighteenth century.3
All of the West Indies felt the effects of the sugar boom of the mid-eighteenth century, particularly the Greater Antilles—Jamaica, Cuba, and Hispaniola, the larger islands of the northwestern Caribbean. In the century after 1670, though at different speeds and by different historical processes, the expansion of sugar cultivation transformed these three islands from sparsely populated frontier outposts to plantation societies based on captive African labor.
British growth centered in Jamaica. After 1740 the planter class had managed to contain the intense factionalism and black rebelliousness of the previous decade enough to attract white settlers, drawn in large part from the stagnating islands to the east. They began to clear and cultivate new lands in the north and west of the island, and to purchase hundreds of thousands of Africans to work the new plantations. By 1766, Jamaica had bolted well past the other British possessions in the West Indies in its importance both as a commercial entrepôt and as a staple-producing economy. Some 200,000 people, half the population of Britain’s sugar colonies, resided there, and its busy ports controlled half the British trade in the region. Despite setbacks encountered during the period of the American Revolution, the rapid extension of sugar monoculture in Jamaica continued through the 1780s.4
As sugar came to dominate the economy of Jamaica, the demographic balance between black and white Jamaicans shifted decisively in favor of the African population. Slave imports into the island rose steadily throughout the eighteenth century, surpassing 120,000 for the twenty-year period between 1741 and 1760, totaling nearly 150,000 in the subsequent two decades, and increasing at an even faster rate after 1781. As early as 1730, nine of every ten Jamaicans were black slaves, and by the eve of the American Revolution almost ninety-four percent of the population of the island was of African ancestry.5
Cuba’s move toward massive investment in the sugar industry, as well as its demographic absorption into Afro-America, occurred both later and more abruptly than in Jamaica. Crucial to the expansion of sugar in this Spanish colony was the British occupation of Havana in 1762. Over a period of eleven months, the British introduced some 10,000 slaves into the island, breathing life into the sugar industry which Cuban planters sustained after the British departure. The Cuban share in the African slave trade, while still miniscule relative to its more thoroughly developed neighbors, increased markedly after 1763. Almost 31,000 Africans were imported between 1763 and 1789, and by 1792 data from the island’s second official census revealed that the white population of Cuba had slipped below the numbers of non-whites for the first time in the history of the island.6
But nowhere was society transformed more quickly or completely than in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The progress of sugar in Jamaica and Cuba paled next to the economic explosion in this mountainous strip of land comprising the western third of the island of Hispaniola. Even as French fortunes waxed and finally waned in the intense imperial competition leading up to the Seven Years’ War, the sudden emergence of Saint-Domingue was astonishing. Still a buccaneering outpost upon its cession to France in 1697, by 1739 Saint-Domingue was the world’s richest and most profitable slave colony. Already the number of sugar mills had reached 450, up from just thirty-five at the turn of the century, and there were more enslaved Africans—over 117,000—working in Saint-Domingue than in Jamaica or in any other Caribbean island. Three years later Saint-Domingue produced more sugar than all the British sugar islands combined. During the American Revolution, French planters took advantage of famine and economic dislocation in the British territories to carve out an even bigger slice of the world sugar market. The increased volume of the slave trade to Saint-Domingue reflects the new boom of the 1770s. In 1771, traders brought slightly more than 10,000 new Africans to Saint-Domingue; five years later, the number had more than doubled. The expansion of the French colony
