Twenty three years of war close a long economic expansion

The expansion of the world economy that began in the first half of the eighteenth century and accelerated after 1750 ended, in Wallerstein's account, in the Franco British wars of 1792 to 1815, a stretch he describes as profitable turbulence. The turbulence was profitable because war on that scale redistributed markets and destroyed competitors while demand for supplies stayed high. The base for the expansion had been laid in the previous century, when the core countries pulled the most valuable activities inside their own frontiers, drove marginal producers out and redistributed just enough revenue at home to lift demand. What the wars settled was which of the two contenders would hold the advantage afterwards. They also emptied the Caribbean of French naval protection for years at a time, which is one of the conditions under which the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue fought and won.

Under French law a child born outside marriage could not inherit, and a parent was not free to leave property as he wished, being obliged to pass it to legitimate heirs. In the new Haitian state an enormous number of children had no standing under any such rule. On 28 May 1805 Jean-Jacques Dessalines issued a law that removed the distinction. There was to be no preference for children born in wedlock. A child's capacity to inherit turned on recognition by a parent. The measure was designed to settle inheritance disputes before they began. Its effect on marriage ran the other way from what the founders intended. A wedding in Haiti cost a civil licence, a payment to the priest and his assistants, clothes bought for the church, a feast afterwards and several days away from work. Once children could inherit without one, the expense had lost its point, and legal marriage stayed rare for the next two centuries.

In January 1810, with the last ships from Cuba still arriving, Governor William Claiborne set down his view of the population he now governed. He confessed apprehension that disorder might break out in a place so mixed and growing more mixed every day. He put the number of free men of colour in and around New Orleans capable of bearing arms at not less than eight hundred, counting those recently landed from Cuba. He allowed that their conduct so far had been correct. He then added that in a country with so large a black population they should be carefully watched. He had already asked the American consul at Santiago de Cuba to steer the remaining French elsewhere, and in November he made the same request of the American agent in Jamaica, saying that Louisiana already had a greater proportion of that kind of population than suited its interests. A rising of enslaved people broke out upriver the following year.

Writing to the naval minister on 25 March 1795, the French representative Etienne Laveaux gave figures that explain why emancipation was not optional. Of 10,288 soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue only 990 remained, and of 952 officers only 262. Yellow fever and malaria, not battle, did most of this. Girard notes a French officer's earlier estimate that four white men had to be sent for one to be alive four years later. Former slaves, numbering more than half a million in Saint-Domingue at the start of the revolution and far more resistant to tropical fevers, became the replacement. Regulations required black civilians to keep working on estates even after abolition, so joining the army was a way out of field labour, and the constitution of 1795 reserved the vote to soldiers and the wealthy. By 1796 a third of the officers and seven eighths of the soldiers in Guadeloupe were black.