One colony out-produces every French and English possession combined

Dupuy sets out the scale of Saint-Domingue on the eve of the revolution to support his argument that plantation slavery was a capitalist institution rather than an archaic survival. Seventy-two percent of the people France transported from Africa went to Saint-Domingue by the mid-eighteenth century, and ninety percent by 1789. The 455,000 enslaved people it held in 1789 outnumbered those of Jamaica, Guadeloupe and Martinique together, and its 793 sugar plantations, 3,117 coffee plantations, 3,150 indigo plantations and 789 cotton plantations out-produced all other French and English colonies combined. By 1789 it exported an annual average of 140 million pounds of sugar valued at 115 million livres, with all goods sent to France averaging 250 million livres carried by some 1,400 ships. The wealth also fed Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle, Marseilles and the manufactures that refined, shipped and supplied. Where this account departs from the standard one: Argues against Brenner, Wood and others that New World slavery must be understood as capitalist, since its sole reason for existing was commodity production for profit.

Vincent Oge, a wealthy mulatre planter from the Nord who was a slaveholder and merchant, returned from revolutionary Paris in October 1790 carrying claims to citizenship rights for propertied free people of colour. With Jean-Baptiste Chavanne he gathered roughly three hundred supporters, mostly gens de couleur, and led armed protests. After French forces crushed them in November 1790, Oge, Chavanne and many followers fled into Santo Domingo, some trying to shelter with the Maniel maroons. Yingling's interest is in what crossing the border did. Spanish officials scrambled to quarantine what they saw as revolutionary contagion in a society with an even higher proportion of free people of colour than Saint-Domingue, and the refugees exposed Dominicans directly to the political and social critiques coming out of the French colony. The quarantine did not hold.

A week before the burnings began, a group of rebel commanders held a ceremony at Morne Rouge, at the place called Bwa Kayiman, where the oungan and rebel leader Boukman prayed for support. The article stresses that Trouillot situates this within a wider pattern rather than treating it as unique: many guerrilla leaders held ceremonies before fighting, Biassou told the enslaved not to flee death because the spirits would return them to Africa, and three quarters of the leaders named, including Boukman, Biassou, Yasint, Lamour Derance and Romaine-la-Prophetesse, were oungan before they were commanders. Calinda dances were the only gatherings the enslaved were permitted, so a dance was simultaneously a cultural event, a religious event and a political meeting. Vodou supplied conviction and organisation at once, working as an adhesive across people separated by language and origin. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects both conventional readings of Bwa Kayiman, that it was merely a political congress and that it was merely a mystical ceremony.

In the same year that he imagined an integrated colonial legislature, Rush told the American Philosophical Society that the colour of African skin was the result of a kind of leprosy. The consequence he drew was that if physicians found a cure, Africans would turn white, the racial justification for slavery and disenfranchisement would disappear, and the formerly enslaved, restored to what he considered their true condition, would be fit for American citizenship. Meanwhile he advised against unions across the colour line for fear of spreading the supposed disease. White declines to call this simple hypocrisy. Rush kept both positions through the 1790s, reprinting the peace office proposal in 1798 while continuing to argue for a medical origin of blackness. The case shows that images let him picture an end to racial violence that his own prose could not support, and it shows whiteness being reasserted as the precondition of political rights.