Saint-Domingue

I had tried to stay up to speed on the literature of the French Revolution.

And, of course, being an Atlanticist, there's so much now that's being done in Saint-Domingue or Haiti.

And so I was tended to be pretty current on that as well.

Other things I had to learn, really... from scratch, which was really exciting but daunting at the same time.

And...

So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you learn, you know, comparatively about the ways in which the enslaved shape struggle over sovereignty and endings.

And like, is it the same across places or are there, there's always variations of themes, but are there distinctions between how we think about the, you know, Saint-Domingue versus North America versus Brazil versus various parts of the Spanish empire versus West Africa?

There's more commonalities than not.

The idea was to turn the Louisiana territory into the breadbasket of France's Caribbean islands.

Because even though the Caribbean islands were fabulously wealthy, for France it would be Haiti in particular, or Saint-Domingue in particular, but they couldn't be self-sufficient because they didn't have a food supply.

They could turn out tons and tons of sugar

cane,

So Napoleon forced the Spanish to give Louisiana territory back to him, back to France.

And then the idea was to create Louisiana territory, use it to be the breadbasket of the Caribbean.

But then you had the revolt in Saint-Domingue, Haiti.

And as you astutely pointed out, Napoleon lost tens of thousands of troops, throwing good money after bad money.

Remember, I'm sure we've mentioned this, but it bears repeating that the Caribbean to both Britain and France was much more important than the North American colonies because for Britain, their sugar producing colonies in the Caribbean produced way more money than the colonies in North America.

So, and of course, France had several colonies there as well, such as Saint-Domingue, the island, half island, which later became Haiti.

And so France and Britain are going to, in addition to fighting on, North America proper on the mainland, they're going to be constantly battling it out in the Caribbean, trying to steal each other's colonies if possible.

Anyway, on April 13th, the Stang, along with 11 ships of the line, one 50-gun ship and four frigates, plus 9,600 crew members, including Marines, Semper Fi, and 1,000 soldiers sailed for North America.

And what that means is that the economy is growing massively, but the returns from this massive growth are actually going, by and large, to the wealthiest, people who are already on top of society.

The most famous example of this is Saint-Domingue, what becomes Haiti, which is a colony of France in the period.

On the eve of the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue is an island where 90% of the population is enslaved.

And the other 10% of the population owns everything, including all of the enslaved people.

Thomas Piketty, the French economist, describes this as the most extreme case of inequality in world history.

There are few surviving written records about Christophe's life immediately after the war.

Over the next decade, we know he worked as a mason and a waiter at a hotel in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then known.

In 1791, when the colony's slaves rose up in rebellion, Christophe got another opportunity to fight for freedom.

Led by Toussaint Louverture, the rebels fought against plantation owners, as well as British and Spanish forces seeking control of the island.

Christophe quickly rose through the ranks, proving himself the equal of more experienced generals.

By 1793, Louverture had successfully liberated all of Saint-Domingue's enslaved people, and by 1801 he'd established the island as a semi-autonomous colony.

But during this time, Napoleon Bonaparte had assumed power in France and made it his mission to restore slavery and French authority throughout the empire.

French attempts to reinstate slavery met fierce resistance, with General Christophe even burning the capital city to prevent military occupation.

In a unique arrangement outlined in the sixteen ninety-seven Treaty of Ryswick at the end of the Nine Years' War, Spain ceded control of roughly one-third of the western side of the island to France.

Under this new arrangement, the western third was dubbed Saint-Domingue, while the eastern two-thirds remained the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo.

It was at this point the two sides of the island began to evolve very different personalities.

In French Saint-Domingue, the island focused on sugar production, becoming a plantation state fueled by slave labor.

By the close of the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue had grown into what was likely the world's most prosperous colony, leading global sugar production.

However, it had become a hellscape for the enslaved people who worked its fields.

The population of Saint-Domingue was more than ninety percent slaves, governed by a small minority of white landowners who oversaw a reign of terror that saw a life expectancy of only seven years for the enslaved people upon arrival.

While the French side of the island received significant colonial attention because of its profitability, Santo Domingo on the eastern side was a totally different world.

They exist in community with each other.

Vodou's roots trace to the Fon and Iwe peoples of the old kingdom of Dahomey in what's now Benin and Togo, blended with Congo and Yoruba traditions carried by hundreds of thousands of enslaved people trafficked into the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

The word itself comes from the Fon language and simply means spirit.

At the center of Vodou is Bondier, a distant supreme creator, who doesn't intervene directly in daily life, a concept that echoes across nearly every West African tradition on this list.