Sugar exports fall to one and a fifth percent of what they had been in 1789

The wars that began with the rising of August 1791 broke the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue by destroying the two things it ran on, forced labour and fixed capital. The export figures show the scale. Measured against their levels of 1789, in 1795 sugar exports stood at 1.2 percent, coffee at 2.8 percent, cotton at 0.7 percent and indigo at 0.5 percent. All four except indigo recovered strongly up to 1802, and then the French invasion of that year pushed them down again, leaving 1804 with sugar at 34 percent, coffee at 40, cotton at 43 and indigo at 4 percent of pre revolutionary levels. Reports from 1803 describe burned cities, demolished sugar mills, carbonised beams and plantations reduced to ash, with only the small plots of coffee and food crops showing any life. The population fell from 520,000 in 1790 to 380,000 in 1805.

Colonial law in Saint Domingue said very little about the religious practices of the enslaved. Through the eighteenth century it forbade dances and night gatherings over and over, leaving the name of the religion out of the text. That changed in 1797, when the French civil commissioner Leger Felicite Sonthonax prohibited vaudou meetings by name. Sonthonax was the official who had proclaimed general emancipation in the North four years earlier. In 1800 Toussaint Louverture repeated the prohibition and widened it to cover all night gatherings, and the reason recorded at the time was that such meetings were carrying talk of massacring the anciens libres, the people of colour who had been free before the revolution. By 1803 a colonist was describing vaudou as an obscene dance used to encourage murder. Leaders who had come out of the plantations themselves were now policing the ceremonies their own soldiers attended.

Yingling treats the Treaty of Basel of 1795 as an unexpected rupture whose costs fell on people who had no part in making it. Spain's hostilities ended at a stroke, the generals of the Black Auxiliaries were exiled, and Santo Domingo was ceded to France. An outward-looking Spanish mission of conquest and evangelisation converted overnight into a defensive effort to protect Dominican territory and Iberian belief. The colony then stayed under weakened Spanish administration for six years while the French cession lagged. When French envoys did arrive, including a racially mixed delegation, they failed in an attempt to abolish Dominican slavery, and they invited Dominicans to join a new revolutionary family, even asking the archbishop of Santo Domingo to become bishop of Ayti. Yingling shows Dominican elites hardening at this point into an association of Blackness with heresy and duplicity. Corroborated by 3 works in the library.

Pierrot cites a London Gazette article of December 1798 celebrating Toussaint as a man born to vindicate the claims of his species and to show that character is independent of exterior colour, and telling every liberal Briton to feel proud that this country had brought about the happy revolution. The same article called him a negro chief or king. The mechanism the article identifies is threefold. Praising the individual detached him from his troops, his struggle and his country; describing him as a chief or king moved him out of politics and into a literary register British readers already knew; and crediting Britain with the outcome erased four years of British warfare against the very revolution being celebrated. Claims that Toussaint was of royal African extraction, true or not, served the same displacement.