Scholars have long tied the rise of Saint-Domingue's wealthy free people of color to the coffee boom that began in the late 1760s. Garrigus tests that chronology in the southern parish of Aquin, working from notarial records, estate inventories and colonial censuses, and finds that the fortunes of families such as the Raimonds, Ploys and Depas-Medinas rested instead on indigo, on three generations of accumulated technical skill, and on a brisk contraband trade that their distance from official ports made possible.

Prosperity of this kind, he argues, began early in the eighteenth century and was merely accelerated after 1760. What changed abruptly was race. Men addressed as Sieur in official papers, their ancestry unremarked, were by the 1780s labelled by colour in the same documents, and apparent surges in the free colored population may register a hardening of that line rather than actual growth. Planters losing civic standing as they gained wealth pressed their claim to citizenship after 1789.