1668 to 1803 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan
Nearly 800,000 people were landed to build the richest colony on earth
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Between 1668 and 1803 close to 800,000 enslaved Africans were landed in Saint-Domingue. That number is the colony. Its sugar, its coffee, its indigo, the fortunes it made in France and its standing as the most productive possession of the eighteenth century all rest on it. The largest share of those people came out of West Central Africa, then the Bight of Benin, then the Bight of Biafra. French merchants ran the traffic, with Nantes and Bordeaux at the front, and they kept it running without a pause for more than a hundred years. The colonial population was therefore mostly African born at any given moment, because deaths on the estates ran high enough that the planters replaced workers rather than raised them. A society of that composition, held down by a small minority, is unstable by construction. In 1791 it broke, and the war that followed produced the only successful slave revolution in history and a state called Haiti.
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