The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard
the North Sea. The French colonial monopoly did not protect sugar prices, but by the middle of the eighteenth century it allowed colonists to refine their product from muscovado or brown sugar to a more valuable clayed or golden sugar. French planters complained they were poorly served by French commerce. The difficulty of travel between French Canada and the Antilles meant that French colonists mostly had to import provisions from France, at a much higher cost than if they could have come legally from ports like Philadelphia or New York. Smuggling was widely practiced in Saint-Domingue, where colonists sold sugar but also cotton and indigo to English captains from Jamaica and North America. The weak supply of African slaves from French slavers was also a special grievance for Saint-Domingue planters.
Just as France and Britain operated under different political conditions during the eighteenth century, so too their colonies were governed in quite separate ways. Jamaica had a much greater degree of self-governing autonomy than did Saint-Domingue, even though London often fought this tendency.41 By comparison with Saint-Domingue, gubernatorial authority was comparatively weak. Governors did not control the money supply, or at least did not do so very effectively, even after 1726, when the Assembly agreed to a perpetual tax supporting the government. Jamaica’s governors had to continuously negotiate with an Assembly elected by the island’s planter class. This body saw itself as the functional equivalent of Parliament, able to make laws as its members saw fit.
What this meant, in short, was that Jamaican planters and merchants were prepared to exercise local authority based on what they believed were their immutable rights as freeborn Englishmen. In the mid-1760s, for example, in an extensive controversy between the Assembly and the governor, Nicholas Bourke defended Jamaicans as “men zealous for the constitution and liberties of their country” against the governor’s supposed support for “the absurd and slavish Doctrines of DIVINE and HEREDITARY RIGHT and PASSIVE OBEDIENCE and NON-RESISTANCE.”42
Saint-Domingue, in contrast, had no such legislative body where patriotic colonists could voice their discontent. All laws came from the colony’s governor-general and often from the Naval Ministry at Versailles. To the extent that the colonial elite had a voice in the government, this voice came from connections to judges sitting on one of two Superior Councils in Port-au-Prince and Cap Français. These bodies began in the seventeenth century as councils of leading planters, but by the eighteenth century they had become formal courts of law, modeled on France’s thirteen regional parlements. Judges were appointed by the Crown and had to have legal training that was available only in France. These Councils were courts of appeal, but, like metropolitan parlements, they had the ceremonial right to register all laws, giving them legal standing. In France’s absolutist tradition, they did not have the right to deny registration, or even to voice complaints about these new laws. But in reality, the Councils saw themselves as representing or protecting the colony against the excesses and errors of royal administrators.
One important way in which Jamaicans exercised their “zealous” regard for their inherited rights as Englishmen was in insisting on almost absolute control—a tyrant’s charter, in fact—over how they treated their enslaved population. There were effectively no constraints in Jamaica limiting slave owners’ behavior toward enslaved people. Saint-Domingue, in contrast, had a comprehensive slave law, the Code Noir of 1685, which theoretically governed relations between slaves and masters in the French colonies. In practice, however, the Code Noir was rarely used to punish masters. Throughout the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue’s planters claimed the right to control and punish slaves as they saw fit. In many ways, the attitudes and claims of Saint-Domingue’s planters resembled those of their Jamaican counterparts, as this book will demonstrate.
The varying geographies of the two colonies; the nature of settlement, commerce, and migration; and, most important, the different configurations of imperial governance made differences between the two islands significant. Yet the similarities were also profound. One major similarity was how each society developed new racial classificatory systems following France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War and Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760. These events were sufficiently traumatic for white colonists to abandon their previous social definition of race in favor of a racism that prefigured the explicitly biological racism of nineteenth-century imperialism. “Whiteness” became more important: “passing” from black to white became more difficult as the state required more documentation from people of mixed ancestry and as new laws restricted their wealth and demeaned their social status. Both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue transformed themselves from places that had a degree of fluidity in their social hierarchies to societies with an almost caste-like racial rigidity. This subjugation of people of color lingered in history for a long time, influencing colonial attitudes to race in places as diverse as nineteenth-century Australasia and South Africa and twentieth-century Southeast Asia.43
We do not claim that Jamaican and Saint-Domingue colonists invented racism. The construction of race is a complex matter, especially in a period where old and new ideas of social identity mixed uneasily. As we explain in Chapters 6 and 7, colonists’ efforts to define who was “white” and who was not arose from short-term political needs as much as from beliefs that blacks were racially inferior. Nevertheless, the emergence of a heightened legal and social awareness of “whiteness” in Jamaica from the 1760s and in Saint-Domingue in the 1770s was an important step in the wider history of race and Atlantic capitalism.44 Before the Seven Years’ War, a literate, nominally Christian man or woman who had freedom, wealth, and connections to a prominent colonial family was considered a member of the colonial elite. By the 1760s and 1770s, however, both societies came to embrace the idea that “whiteness” was more important than mere freedom, or even wealth, in determining social and political position.
In this twin portrait, we are conscious that while the historical trajectories of the two colonies merged together at times, in the end the historical experience of the two places led to different futures. Jamaica flourished during the twenty five years that followed Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War. But Saint-Domingue experienced an even greater transformation, catapulting it above Jamaica in wealth and imperial importance. The British may have won the war in the Greater Antilles but the French most definitely won the peace. As the fourth chapter of this book details, the irony of the Seven Years’ War was that the long term result of the conflict, in the Caribbean as much as in North America, was that the winner (Britain) lost while the loser (France) triumphed. By allowing France to rebuild in the Caribbean after the Seven Years’ War, Britain threw away the advantages it had gained for itself in its victories of the late 1750s and early 1760s. But another irony lurked in French 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