The count everyone calls Toussaint's owner never owned him

The article dismantles a fixture of the biographies. Toussaint was never the property of the comte de Noé. The Caribbean branch of the family was founded by Pantaléon de Bréda, a Paris born naval officer who married a Saint-Domingue Creole and died about five years before Toussaint's birth, so Toussaint's first owner was his widow Elisabeth Bodin. On her death in 1752 the Haut-du-Cap estate passed to their son, known as Pantaléon the second, who held it until he died in this year, by which time Toussaint had been free for a decade or more. Because that owner died without heirs, the property was split among four nieces and nephews, and the comte de Noé received only a quarter share long after the emancipation, though he did become part owner of Toussaint's relatives who were still enslaved. Where this account departs from the standard one: The traditional account makes the comte de Noe Toussaint's master; the estate papers show ownership ran through Elisabeth Bodin and her son, and that Noe inherited only a quarter share in 1786.

In 1785, acting on a denunciation, police raided a house near Cachoeira in Bahia where six people had gathered, all of whom said they were Jeje, a Brazilian term for people born in the Gbe speaking region of the Bight of Benin. Their leader, Sebastiao de Guerra, had been accused of sorcery once before and was publicly known for curing charms, dancing calundus and leading worship in the Jeje language. What the police carried away differed from what earlier raids had produced. Alongside small calabashes holding ingredients for spells there were buried objects and an arrangement of leaves, and leaves were central to the worship of the vodun, to initiation and to medicinal baths in the Bight of Benin. The gathering looked less like a healing consultation and more like a shrine with offerings and a congregation. Historians read the case as an early moment in the formation of Candomble as an institution.

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 gives the arithmetic of the sugar economy without softening it. In 1700 there were about nine thousand enslaved people in the whole colony. In 1790, at the height of its prosperity, it imported forty eight thousand in that single year and the enslaved population passed five hundred thousand. He attributes the scale of importation to mortality rather than to growth, since between five and six percent of the enslaved population died every year. His explanation is structural rather than moral. Sugar needed acreage, machinery and hundreds of workers, so estates were large and often owned by absentees in Cap Francais or Paris who hired managers paid on the year's crop, which gave the managers every reason to work people to death for short term profit. He adds that yellow fever and malaria killed newly arrived whites at an even higher rate than newly arrived Africans. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard attributes the high death rate mainly to sugar, climate and absentee management rather than to any special viciousness of French planters.