A German print dresses the planters of Saint-Domingue as Germans

An anonymous German engraving of about 1797 shows the rising of 1791 on the northern plain with palm trees and conical roofed houses for tropical atmosphere, while the white figures look lifted from a north European genre painting, the women in familiar headgear and the men in tight suits. An image of the cruelty of the blacks in a Swiss almanac of 1803 does the same work through architecture, staging a murder in a room with a tiled floor, an arched doorway and portraits and a map on the walls. White argues that these choices are deliberate rather than ignorant, since the makers invented fanciful costume for the enslaved and could have used French styles for the colonists. Dressing the victims as locals delivered an anti revolutionary message to German and Swiss viewers, and shows that printmakers could not count on shared skin colour alone to produce sympathy across old European rivalries.

The colonial jurist Moreau de Saint-Mery set out a scale of eleven colour classes for Saint-Domingue. Pure white and pure black each stood at one hundred and twenty eight parts. The sacatra carried sixteen white parts, the griffe thirty two, the marabou forty eight, the mulatto sixty four, the quarteron ninety six, the metif one hundred and twelve, the mameluc one hundred and twenty, the quarteronne one hundred and twenty four, the sang mele one hundred and twenty six. Anyone with fewer than eight white parts was a negro. The scale ran one way only. Any recorded black ancestry kept a person out of the white category permanently. Moreau also counted how many parental combinations could produce each rank, twenty for the quarteron, twelve for the mulatto, none at all for the two extremes. He observed that children came out in places his arithmetic had not predicted, and he observed in passing that the eye of prejudice did the sorting.

The French forces fighting alongside the Caribs on St Vincent agreed to capitulate in June 1796, a little over a year after the war began. The Caribs would not sign. They stayed in the mountains and went on attacking British troops from them, living on hidden provision grounds of plantains and yams and on roots and leaves when those ran out. One British soldier wrote to his father that they were still in the field and engaged in a butchering war with people who neither gave nor received quarter. Leadership had passed to the son of Joseph Chatoyer, the elder Chatoyer having been killed in the first days of the fighting. The younger man told British negotiators that it was no disgrace for Caribs to surrender to a great nation, since the subjects of France and even of England must submit when resistance is no longer possible. On the appointed day a few hundred appeared out of more than four thousand.

Thomas opens with the position he wants to explain, that by 1797 Toussaint's authority over the island was essentially uncontested: he had expelled the French agent Hedouville without a fight, was independently negotiating the British withdrawal, had instituted his own agrarian policies and was restoring commercial standing on his own terms. That compressed list is the premise for the article's central question, which is why a leader in that position declined to declare independence when a declaration would have gratified his base, legitimised the struggle and strengthened his diplomatic hand. The mechanism Thomas will propose is calculated dependence. Readers should note that Hedouville did not reach the colony until 1798 and left in October of that year, so the article's own dating of the expulsion is a year early. The slip matters because the article's whole case turns on sequence. Where this account departs from the standard one: Thomas places the expulsion of Hedouville in or before 1797, whereas the agent arrived in the colony in 1798 and left in October of that year.