The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

in the mid-1740s thought that Jamaica was the most substantial financial contributor to the British Empire, with its trade to Spanish America worth £900,000 sterling per annum in 1745, making its total trade worth £1.5 million, compared to New England’s £1 million.⁴¹ James Abercromby, a Scottish imperial thinker who had lived in the colonies, argued in a similar vein in 1752. He ranked twenty-three colonies in British America in terms of their worth to the empire. Jamaica ranked thirteenth in fighting men but second in value of produce and first in value of the British goods it imported.⁴²

      As this data suggests, the wealth of Kingston’s merchants continued after the Asiento ended in 1740. The most recent estimate of intercolonial slave departures from Jamaica (mainly from Kingston) suggests that between 1741 and 1790, 62,600 Africans were exported from Jamaica to foreign markets with a further 11,075 leaving in the same period for other British colonies. It was the most active such entrepôt in British America. Cuba was a popular destination, as was Cartagena, with the southern regions of Saint-Domingue also attracting considerable illegal smuggling. By the 1760s, Kingston merchants had begun to expand their trade in slaves and other goods to other places, such as the Bahamas and Honduras, as well as to familiar Spanish American and North American destinations. The American Revolution was a blow to such trade, but it quickly picked up again in the 1780s.⁴³

      Kingston merchants also made substantial sums from money lending. Planters approached them for credit to acquire slaves, livestock, land, and mill equipment as well as to fund conspicuous consumption and to pay out family inheritances. The biggest moneylenders provided large sums to their clients. Fifteen Jamaican colonists (eight of whom were Kingston merchants) left inventories showing they lent out more than £60,000 or 138,000 livres to creditors. To keep this in perspective, only one man in British North America—Charles Carroll of Annapolis—lent money on the Jamaican scale, with £57,400 out on loan in 1776.⁴⁴

      Located on the Atlantic coast, the “French Cape” was, like Kingston, a major location for the arrival of Africans in the New World, and a significant site for the transculturation that created a creole society in Saint-Domingue. Although it did not dominate colonial commerce like Kingston did, Cap Français received roughly half of Saint-Domingue’s incoming African slave ships; Port-au-Prince, the colony’s second slave port, received only 30 percent. While eighteenth-century Jamaica received slave ships coming from fifty-eight sites on the African coast, according to surviving records Saint-Domingue received human cargoes from seventy-six African ports. Even more than Kingston, therefore, Cap Français was a place where different African peoples became Americans.⁴⁵

      Unlike Kingston, however, Saint-Domingue did not reexport its African captives. Rather, the French colony received slaves from other empires, often illegally. Saint-Domingue, as one expert describes it, was continually in the grip of a terrible labor shortage. Planters blamed imperial restrictions on foreign trade, though the real culprit was the relentless work regime on many plantations, and the ongoing expansion of those plantations. David Geggus estimates that in one region of Saint-Domingue’s southern peninsula, between 10 and 15 percent of slaves there had been purchased from British traders, probably sailing out of Kingston.⁴⁶

      By the end of the colonial period, the ten thousand enslaved people living in Cap Français made up 67 percent of the city’s population. Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes had similar compositions. Thus slaves, who made up 90 percent of the overall colonial population, were underrepresented in the cities.⁴⁷ But their labor and actions determined cities’ character. David Geggus has summarized what little we know about the 4 or 5 percent of slaves in Saint-Domingue who lived in towns, villages, or hamlets.⁴⁸ Their characteristics resembled, in exaggerated form, those of the slave population as a whole. They were mainly male, African, and overwhelmingly adult: 65 percent of slaves in Cap Français were adult males, and only 13 percent were children, compared to 41 and 23 percent on sugar estates in the northern province. Nearly two-thirds of urban slaves were not locally born, the great majority being born in Africa. A few were described as “foreign creoles,” and they tended to be slaves transported for being troublesome in other places like Martinique, Guadeloupe, or the Mississippi. They continued to be troublesome in their new homes, being disproportionately represented in fugitive slave advertisements.⁴⁹

      The lives of urban slaves, while hard, were probably better than the lives of rural slaves. Colonists certainly believed they were better fed and healthier, and had more personal property. Indeed, their clothes, which seemed to some whites like gaudy finery, gave them away as relatively privileged, at least compared to slaves on distant plantations, who often went about nearly naked or dressed in rags.⁵⁰ As in Kingston, they had more opportunities than rural slaves to establish independent lives where they hired themselves out and, after paying a portion of their wages to their owners, lived separately. Colonists found such independence disturbing, seeing these slaves as “thieves and receivers of stolen goods.”⁵¹ They warned that these hired-out urban slaves encouraged rebellious thoughts and rebellious actions in the plantation workers who flocked to the cities every Sunday to sell their produce. Moreau, for example, was highly critical of the ribaldry, breaking of laws, potential for clandestine gathering, and unwelcome practice of subversive religion that went on at these markets, or elsewhere. He described how slaves gathered together for dances in an old cemetery at the edge of Cap Français contemptuously, as “a spectacle of fury and pleasure.”⁵²

      A remarkable report by the Chamber of Agriculture in 1785 gave voice to white fears of slave depravity in Cap Français and to its potential consequences. Bemoaning that “the Negroes are so open in their insubordination that the line of demarcation between whites and slaves has almost vanished,” the authors of the report predicted “grave events” if no one “put an end to this evil.” They urged that the town authorities put a stop to their tolerance of slaves’ “nightly gatherings and gambling dens, their nocturnal dances, associations, and brotherhoods.” What particularly disturbed the chamber was how slaves insolently refused to give way to whites on the street—they gave several horrified accounts of such insolence. They were even more concerned at slaves’ tendency to travel at all times “with a large stick.” On holidays, they lamented that “you find 2,000 of them gathered at La Providence, La Fossette and Petit Carénage [neighborhoods on the edge of the city] all armed with sticks, drinking rum and doing the kalinda.”⁵³ Nevertheless, despite these provocations and despite the potential for riot that large gatherings of armed and drunk young adult men provided, urban slaves were remarkably politically quiescent. There were no urban revolts in any of Saint-Domingue’s towns before the start of the French Revolution and little involvement by urban slaves in the initial stages of the Haitian Revolution. David Geggus argues that while towns facilitated social flux and opportunities for subversive gatherings, they were also places full of whites, including a concentration of soldiers and sailors, thus making armed uprisings difficult.⁵⁴

      Another critical group in Saint-Domingue’s cities, indeed in all Caribbean cities, was free people of color. On islands where whites controlled most arable land, ex-slaves and their descendants tended to gravitate toward the cities to find work. In late eighteenth-century Barbados, for example, free coloreds were about 6 percent of the residents of Bridgetown, but only 3 percent of the total colonial population.⁵⁵ In Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, however, vacant rural land was available. In Saint-Domingue specifically, a system of royal land grants made it possible for free coloreds to become peasants, market farmers, and ranchers. A small but significant minority became indigo, cotton, and coffee planters.⁵⁶ As we explore in Chapter 6, in Jamaica colonial elites took measures after Tacky’s Revolt in 1760 to prevent whites from bequeathing land and slaves to free people of color. In Saint-Domingue such laws were discussed but never implemented, making it possible for free families of color to eventually accumulate enough land and enslaved workers to establish plantations.⁵⁷

      One consequence of the economic opportunities available in Saint-Domingue’s countryside was that free people of color were not especially concentrated in the cities, unlike whites and unlike their counterparts in Jamaica. They were only 6 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes, while they were 5 percent of the overall colonial population. Cap Français was