1691 to 1703 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan
Du Casse rebuilds the colony with people stolen from Jamaica
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Jean-Baptiste du Casse took charge of the French settlements on the western side of Hispaniola in 1691 and spent twelve years turning a buccaneer coast into a colony. He shifted the capital to Leogane in 1695. In June 1694 he led a raid on English Jamaica that stripped the sugar works of their machinery and carried three thousand enslaved people back across the water to be put on Saint-Domingue estates. That is how the colony was capitalised: by seizing equipment and people from a neighbour. In 1697 the Peace of Ryswick gave France formal title to the territory he had been assembling. Du Casse treated the place as a base as much as a plantation, a place d'armes from which France could reach at Spanish Mexico and Peru. His final act was the charter of the Compagnie de St. Louis in 1698, which settled the southern peninsula with fifteen hundred French emigrants and twenty five hundred Africans. The ratio in that last sentence is the colonial project stated in figures.
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