Nearly thirty thousand Africans landed in a single year

Healy assembles the demography of the colony from import statistics rather than from planters' accounts. She cites a figure of 29,506 Africans imported in one year alone and argues that the enslaved population nearly doubled through importation rather than through any improvement in treatment. Her conclusion is arithmetical. The system in the French part of the island destroyed about five thousand human beings a year, and on an island where the death rate exceeded the birth rate by two and a half per cent the enslaved population would have vanished within fifty years had the traffic been stopped while slavery continued. She dismisses the apologists' claim that planters preferred buying to breeding because pregnancy interfered with work, and quotes a formerly enslaved writer describing a world that ended at the edge of his sight.

Pennsylvania freed any enslaved person whose owner brought them into the state and settled there for six months. Colonists arriving from Saint Domingue met the deadline and then signed the newly freed person to an indenture, until the age of twenty eight for a child, or seven years for anyone over twenty one. Most of the black refugees were teenagers, so the term ran for most of their working youth. Between 1791 and 1795 some 284 slaveholding colonists released 442 people, and nearly all went straight into indentures which the former owners then sold for cash to farmers who wanted labour cheaper than white wages. Of 659 people released from bondage in the city between 1789 and 1810, forty five walked away outright. One colonist tried to beat the clock by moving her slaves across the river to Burlington after five months and three weeks; the abolition society argued six lunar months of twenty eight days and won.

The first population figures Oostindie treats as reliable date from 1789 and give a total of almost twenty-one thousand. Of these, 12,864 were enslaved, 3,714 were free people of colour and 4,410 were white, the white group itself split by a census into 2,469 Protestants, 1,095 Sephardic Jews and 846 servants of unstated religion. Oostindie's point is that this was an atypical Caribbean colony: no tropical export staple, a free trade harbour, and an unusually large free non-white population. Roughly a hundred thousand Africans had been landed on Curaçao across the Dutch period, mostly between 1667 and 1730, with the last imports in the 1770s, so the enslaved population was already heavily locally born. By the time slavery ended in the Dutch West Indies in 1863 the enslaved number had fallen to 5,498.

The engravings of the revolution are remarkable for their narrowness. Where the visual record of the French and American revolutions follows events year by year and sometimes month by month, that of the Haitian Revolution fixes on two moments at Cap Francais, the rising of 1791 and the fighting of 1793, and then jumps to the independence campaign of the early 1800s. Many prints were made in Europe by people who had never crossed the Atlantic, whose aims ranged from selling an arresting picture to damping enthusiasm for abolition to attacking the French revolutionary government. As a group they show black violence against white residents and property and pass over the brutality of white men toward people of African descent. White draws the political consequence. Readers in Europe and America learned of abolition and of black troops defeating British invaders in text, but what they saw was the port on fire. Where this account departs from the standard one: White argues the Haitian Revolution was made into a race war partly by objects, against accounts that treat the racial framing as a straightforward description of events.