Curaçao counts 12,864 slaves among 20,988 people in 1789

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.

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.

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.

Girard's conclusion turns a linguistic profile into a political verdict. Born to Arada parents in a French Caribbean colony, Toussaint lived at the intersection of African, American and European worlds but did not weigh them equally. By pushing Ewe-Fon into the background, Girard argues, he buries pan-African interpretations of his career. Unlike the autonomist planters of the eighteenth century or Haitian nationalists today, he did not use Kreyol to assert creole pride, which cuts against readings of him as a proto-independentist. The language he preferred in writing, and often in speech, was the one he associated with social advancement: French, the language of a colonial system he never got out of. Girard characterises his French as laborious and almost ashamed, the French of a provincial arriving in the capital full of ambition and trying to hide his accent. Where this account departs from the standard one: Argues against both the pan-African and the proto-independentist readings of Toussaint, on the evidence of his linguistic choices rather than his politics.