Burnard and Garrigus set Jamaica and Saint-Domingue side by side across the years between 1748 and 1788, when both colonies were at their most productive. Their claim is that the integrated sugar estate, which grew cane and turned it into crystals on the same ground, worked as an early form of industry: field gangs sorted by physical stamina, harvest schedules timed to the capacity of mill and boiling house, and managers who described their operations in the mechanical vocabulary of the period. Samuel Martin's 1765 planting manual supplies the governing image of an estate as a machine of interlocking wheels. Wealth on this scale reshaped colonial society. Planters and their employees made money rather than birth the measure of standing, wrote new racial laws in the 1760s that turned whiteness into a qualification for full citizenship, and struggled to build any sense of belonging to the places that enriched them.