When the British leased out the estates of absentee planters in the districts they still held in 1796, they generated something historians of Saint-Domingue rarely have: 197 plantation inventories compiled on a common model within a single six-month window. Geggus uses them to describe a slave society at one moment, across roughly fifteen thousand people.

The tabulations cut in several directions. Ethnic origins varied sharply by region and by crop, which complicates any single estimate of the colony's African composition, and the traces of contraband imports suggest that common figures for illicit slave trading are too high. Sugar and coffee estates differed in structure, and the population looks more creolized and more evenly balanced by sex than had been supposed. What the columns show most starkly is physical ruin: nearly two-fifths under sixteen or over sixty, a tenth recorded as of no value, one adult man in six sick, disabled or dying.