In its last sixteen years the colony lands 301,320 people from Africa

From 1775 until the rising of 1791, ships landed 301,320 people from Africa in Saint Domingue. West Central Africa and Saint Helena accounted for 143,181 of them, about forty seven and a half per cent, far ahead of the Bight of Benin with 56,198. Sixteen years is short enough that a large share of the people alive in the colony in 1791 had come through that trade and had been born on the other side of the ocean. No other French Caribbean colony looked like this. Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana all saw their West Central African share fall in the same years. Saint Domingue was the only French colony where the number from that region rose and stayed the largest group right up to the revolt, and it was the only French colony where the enslaved population rose in force and won.

At the end of the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue held between 400,000 and 500,000 enslaved people, about 40,000 whites, and some 25,000 free black people and people of mixed descent. In 1789 the colony had 793 sugar plantations. It accounted for more than a third of all French trade outside France, which made it the richest possession the country had, and every year five hundred ships unloaded its sugar, coffee, indigo, copper and timber in French ports. The whites who lived there, whether petty clerks or great planters, were occupied with dinners, balls, taverns and theatres, and with quarrels over the mistresses of estate managers. They resented the rule that colonial produce could be sold only to France and only at prices France set. Visitors were already describing the place as a volcano under the feet of the dancers, and the arithmetic at the head of this entry explains why.

Spanish commercial policy had long kept Santo Domingo poor, taxing and restricting the dealings that its colonists conducted with their French neighbours and with foreign ships. When Charles III came to the Spanish throne and liberalised colonial trade, the colony's economy began to move. Traders from several nations found their way to its coasts. Jose Gabriel Garcia, writing in the 1870s, singled out the 1770s under Brigadier Jose Solano as the happiest and most fortunate stretch of the whole colonial period he was describing. The improvement was brief. Within twenty years the revolution in the French part of the island had begun, and the concern of officials in Santo Domingo shifted from controlling smuggling to keeping revolutionary ideas out. Garcia treated the whole episode as proof of his own liberal argument, that Santo Domingo suffered from Spanish protectionism and prospered whenever Spain relaxed its grip.

Jean Pierre Boyer was born in the colonial capital in the year the United States declared independence, a coincidence Baur uses to frame a life spent between the Atlantic revolutions. He was in France as a young man, returned home in time for the English invasion of 1793, and later fled again toward France, a voyage interrupted when his ship was taken by Americans during the undeclared naval war between the United States and the French Republic at the end of the decade. Released once the crisis passed, he lived in Paris until the autumn of 1801. The article treats this itinerary as the making of a politician who understood European powers from the inside, and who returned to a country where Dessalines proclaimed independence at the start of 1804 and was killed by an assassin's bullet two years later.