Geggus treats the fifteen-year struggle that turned France's richest colony into independent Haiti as the most transformative of the Atlantic revolutions, and measures the claim in export figures, casualty counts and population loss. Saint-Domingue supplied Europe with sugar, coffee and indigo on a scale exceeding the whole United States, held more than half a million enslaved people, and carried an unusually large and propertied free population of colour whose exclusion from political rights proved explosive. Colonial and metropolitan politics radicalised each other after 1789. Sonthonax abolished slavery in 1793 as a desperate bid to hold the colony for France, and the Convention extended the measure to all French colonies. Toussaint Louverture built a disciplined army from former slaves, then imposed forced plantation labour that cost him popular support. Independence came as a last resort against Bonaparte's reconquest. The international echoes were contradictory, advancing abolition in some places and enriching plantation slavery in others.