Saint-Domingue carries a third of French foreign trade

In 1789 the French colony of Saint-Domingue carried about a third of French foreign trade, a volume comparable to the whole external trade of the United States. Exports that year came to seventy five million dollars. The mills turned out roughly seventy thousand tonnes of sugar and the hillsides thirty five thousand tonnes of coffee. Thirteen years earlier the colony had already produced more wealth for France than all of Spanish America produced for Spain. The people who made this happen numbered about four hundred thousand enslaved men, women and children, twenty eight thousand free people of colour and free blacks, and forty thousand white colonists. None of the three groups was uniform. Among the enslaved there were drivers, workshop hands, house servants and field gangs, creoles born in the colony and bossales freshly landed from Africa, and maroons who had gone into the mountains to farm coffee and provisions for themselves. Among the whites there were small artisans and shopkeepers alongside absentee planters and the agents of metropolitan trading houses.

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.

Measuring rebellions by the number of people involved, Geggus finds that no mainland American revolt appears to have mobilised more than a thousand enslaved people, and that only the Louisiana rising of 1811 passed a hundred in North America. The West Indies and Guianas produced eight or nine that reached a thousand or more. Within that group the rising on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue is in a class of its own for magnitude, length and outcome, and it triggered further revolts elsewhere in the colony, at Leogane and Jacmel and on the Cul de Sac plain in early 1792, at Anse a Veau and on the Cayes plain the same year, and possibly in the Artibonite. He notes that in the biggest cases historians stop counting armed men and start estimating everyone living in rebel held ground, which makes the figures soft.

In Mocombe's account the revolution opens with a religious assembly rather than with an attack. On 14 August 1791, in the mountains of the northern corridor, elders and delegates of the different African nations gathered for a Petwo ceremony. Cecile Fatiman, a manbo mounted by the lwa Ezili Dantor, cut the throat of a black pig and passed the blood to the participants, who swore to unite and to build a society on new principles. She then named the leadership: Georges Biassou, Jeannot, Jean-Francois and Macaya. Mocombe reports the late Max Beauvoir's claim that a human being was in fact sacrificed that night, and that kochon nwa was the French label for maroons. His larger point is that the assembly, run by oungan, manbo, gangan and elders, cannot be squeezed into a Hegelian struggle for recognition. Where this account departs from the standard one: Dates the ceremony and the start of the revolution to 14 August, where Dubois in this same batch argues for 21 August, and rejects Buck-Morss's reading of the revolution through Hegel's master and slave.