Istwa Nou

For most of its existence Saint-Domingue was the leading point of disembarkation for enslaved Africans anywhere in the Caribbean, and it held that place until the revolution destroyed the plantation regime. More than 770,000 people were landed there. They came chiefly from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa, the regions where French traders were strongest. Every major French Atlantic port, Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Le Havre, treated the colony as its best market in the Americas through the eighteenth century, and the returns paid for town houses that still stand in those cities. The output justified the traffic in the eyes of the men running it: sugar, coffee and indigo in quantities no other colony matched. The same arithmetic produced the revolution. A territory that must import people on that scale in order to function has a population with no reason to defend it, and in 1791 it stopped functioning.