A new governor reports that marronage has almost never been lower

The governor La Luzerne wrote in September 1786 that marronage had been decreasing for two years and that its incidence had probably never been so low, and he repeated the claim in August 1787. He thought the great majority of cases were short-term and local. Nocturnal banditry in a north-eastern parish in 1787 was found to be the work of plantation slaves rather than maroons, and despite systematic searches few runaways could be found anywhere in Saint-Domingue and no permanent bands at all. Geggus notes La Luzerne had arrived only in mid-1786 and so was not claiming credit. He sets against this a colonist writing from Cap Français in 1785 that maroons were growing daily in number and boldness, and observes that such complaints were as old as the colony and were here aimed at reversing recent liberal legislation. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the article of faith among many Haitian historians that a rising tide of marronage culminated in 1791, Geggus argues the evidence suggests the opposite, and that Fouchard's runaway advertisement counts may really measure the growth of the colonial press or the efficiency of the rural police.

Ottobah Cugoano was captured and enslaved, worked on Caribbean plantations, and came to London in the middle of the eighteenth century with the man who owned him. There he wrote a critique of slavery that starts from a different place than the abolitionist argument around him. In the late eighteenth century he described the imperial organisation of the slave trade and the triangular Atlantic economy it belonged to. His conception of sovereignty considers people first and institutions afterwards. No human being has the right to enslave another, and therefore the task is to build institutions that cannot do it, rather than to reform the state so that it complies on paper while surviving intact. He named the Atlantic nations whose internal quarrels set the rules of that trade, Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, and observed that Africans and the peoples of the Americas were not consulted about any of it.

The Dominicans who drafted a slave code in 1784 attached to it an account of what the colony actually produced. Apart from tobacco grown around Santiago in the north, they judged sugar to be the only export worth naming, and they counted 760 black and brown workers on nineteen sugar mills. That was the whole plantation sector of Spanish Santo Domingo. Across the mountains, the French colony of Saint Domingue was working several hundred thousand people on cane and coffee and was the richest European possession in the Americas. The Spanish side lived instead on cattle. Ranching estates called hatos sold meat and hides, much of it across the border, where French planters needed meat to feed their labour force and leather to make the whips used on it. Most of the manufactured goods reaching Dominican households came in through smuggling, which was cheaper and better than anything the official Spanish channels supplied.

Girard narrates the gathering at Bois Caiman with all its detail, the storm on the horizon, Boukman the Jamaican born priest, Jeannot, Biassou and Jean-Francois, the mambo Cecile Fatiman cutting the throat of a black pig, the participants drinking the blood and keeping hairs for charms, and the declaration that the god of war wanted them to rise. Then he withdraws most of it. The vivid particulars were added in the nineteenth century by the Frenchman Antoine Dalmas, who wanted the rebels to look like savages in a satanic cult, and no French witness could have attended a meeting called to plan their deaths. Slave gatherings occurred and the revolt followed, and that is all that is known, with genuine uncertainty as to whether the meeting fell on 21 August or the previous Sunday, the fourteenth. He predicts the scene will open histories two centuries from now anyway. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard treats the canonical Bois Caiman scene as largely a nineteenth century French invention and leaves even its date open.