Article
Explicitly comparative works like this one (or like Gwendolyn Hall’s Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of Saint-Domingue and Cuba) often succeed in setting historical developments into a new light. Here, the authors begin by affirming the industrial nature of sugar-production in their two chosen islands during the eighteenth century. They exaggerate a little in affirming the novelty of this development, considering that fully-fledged industrial enterprises had long existed in Europe, in the construction of galleys at the Venetian Arsenal, for instance or in the manufacture of artillery in the arsenals of early seventeenth-century France.
They go on first to set out the ways in which sugar-production in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue differed from earlier models in the Lesser Antilles, and then to explain the similarities in the two larger islands. These both had new and fertile land to bring into production, and a terrain which encouraged the use of communications by sea, as well as allowing the formation of extensive maroon communities. Both relied on the ruthless exploitation of an enslaved population, only slightly mitigated in Saint-Domingue by occasional adherence to the Code Noir. In both islands the resident white population was earning a reputation back in Europe for extravagant living combined with extreme cruelty.
The dust-jacket of this book brings out this combination with remarkable force. An elegant white woman bowls along in a handsome carriage, attended by two footmen. She is just passing a pair of slaves, both in irons and one of them wearing an iron collar. This astonishing vignette comes from the corner of a manuscript plan of a plantation of Saint-Domingue, now preserved at the Musée franco-américain du château de Blérancourt. It is hard to imagine what was going through the head of the artist-cartographer Louis de Beauvernet. Is this a radical criticism of the state of affairs at the habitation, or does Beauvernet simply think of himself as offering an objective record of West Indian life? This is, at all events, a most unusual Caribbean estate plan.
For the authors, the 1760s marked a time of change, when the precarious nature of the slave societies was startlingly revealed. In Jamaica, this was the effect of Tacky’s rebellion of 1760, and in Saint-Domingue it was the result of the Macandal poisonings. In both islands, colour-consciousness seems to have been accentuated, while both islands became more amenable to, and dependent on, orders from Paris and London. As the authors put it, ‘by the 1770s, both colonies had developed firm ideologies of whiteness, emphasising that only those of “pure” European ancestry were full citizens’ (164).
During the wars between the French and English crowns in the eighteenth-century Caribbean (1740–1748 and 1756–1763), there was curiously little effect on Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Indeed, according to the authors, even the wars of the American Revolution ‘in the Greater Antilles is a tale of events that did not happen’ (217). In both colonies, their need of metropolitan soldiers in order to ensure the subjection of the slaves precluded the existence of any serious movement of independence. Of course, the activity both of royal navies and of privateers sometimes brought ruin to unfortunate merchants in Europe, but in general the sugar-producers in the islands continued to thrive, right down to the 1790s. Indeed, in the case of Jamaica ‘the point at which [the island] seems to have been in clear economic decline gets pushed back closer and closer to the eve of emancipation’ (220).
By then, of course, Saint-Domingue had undergone a traumatic transformation. But the authors invite us to suspend our later knowledge in 1790, when the position of the islands had been reversed. About 1750, Jamaica might have been slightly ahead of Saint-Domingue in sugar-production, but by 1790 or so the latter island was producing three times as much sugar as Jamaica. This was due not only to the island’s greater size, but also to greater investment in both machinery and irrigation-systems (246).
By that time the industrial machine, in the shape of ‘the integrated plantation model’, had been perfected in both islands, even as it was coming under repeated and sustained criticism from humanitarians in Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, we would have the remarkable phenomenon of coffee-planters from Saint-Domingue fleeing with some of ‘their’ slaves to Jamaica, where, in a final example of the islands’ interrelationship, these Saint-Dominguans succeeded in setting Jamaican coffee-cultivation on a new footing.