Saint-Domingue and Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century
The Atlantic slave trade and slavery dramatically increased in the eighteenth century. Relying on imports of enslaved Africans to respond to the growing consumption of sugar in Europe, Saint-Domingue and Jamaica became the two largest sugar producers in the Americas.
Huge estates emerged in both colonies, replacing Barbados and Martinique as the leaders in this industry. Meanwhile, Brazil became the third sugar-producing colony in the Western Hemisphere. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as far as slavery persisted, plantation economies depended entirely on the workforce of enslaved Black men, women, and children.As plantation slavery expanded and became a highly profitable business in the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies in the West Indies during the eighteenth century, the sizes of plantations and slaveholdings increased. Estates of over two hundred acres and comprising at least 100 slaves became typical.48 In the British West Indies, the enslaved population also increased exponentially. Replacing Barbados, Jamaica became the wealthiest British colony in the West Indies, with a population of 100,000 enslaved individuals in 1740.49 Moreover, sugar production saw an impressive increase in the second half of the eighteenth century in Jamaica. The enslaved population growth followed suit. In 1788 the colony’s population in bondage increased to approximately 255,000 slaves, who made up 90 percent of its total population.50 Land ownership concentration also amplified during this period. Likewise, the average size of slaveholdings augmented to nearly 200 slaves per estate.51
In Jamaica, white planters had complete control over plantation and slave ownership, making the imbalance between the small white population (including slave owners, planters, managers, and overseers) and the huge number of enslaved persons, many of whom were African-born men and women, all the more stark.
Unlike in Saint-Domingue, the free population of color was very small in Jamaica, where for each white individual, there were roughly ten enslaved persons.As we will see in chapter 14, the disparity between the large number of enslaved Black workers, including many African-born bondspeople, and the small white population in colonies that mostly relied on a plantation economy, especially sugar production, was a matter of concern for slave owners, planters, and their agents, who feared slave revolts. But in times of relative peace, how did such a small population of white men, and few women, control the vast enslaved Black majority? There is no single answer to this question. Slave owners mastered a system designed to surveil, control, and punish enslaved people, leading bondspeople to constantly fear physical punishment. Planters and their agents also controlled weapons, tools, horses, and the circulation of information. Moreover, slave owners and managers used accounting to control enslaved populations.52 Especially in large sugar plantations, accounting allowed planters to document all aspects of the daily life of bondspeople, including births, deaths, diseases, newly purchased enslaved individuals, insurgent behavior, distribution of food, supplies, and working tools, and also productivity. Planters understood that increasing efficiency led to bigger profits, therefore sugar estates were gradually transformed into early capitalist ventures. Still, physical brutality and efficient management were not the only available instruments of control. In Brazil, the Spanish Americas, and the US South, planters also used religion and small incentives such as amounts of money and food. These paternalistic attitudes encouraged enslaved people to submit and stay under control on sugar, tobacco, cotton, and coffee plantations.
As the production of sugar, coffee, and other crops increased, Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population also grew. In 1700, the number of slaves was approximately 9,082 individuals.
Just fifty years later, Saint-Domingue already had a population of 150,000 enslaved persons. As in Jamaica, this number greatly contrasted with the estimated white population of approximately 14,000 people. Four decades later, on the eve of the French Revolution, despite imprecise figures, historians estimate that in 1789, Saint-Domingue’s population included approximately 465,000 enslaved men, women, and children, corresponding to nearly half the overall enslaved population of the West Indies. Many of these bondspeople were born on the African continent and transported to the colony. Again here, there was a great disparity between the large enslaved population and the small number of white people, then assessed at 31,000 individuals, and the population of free people of color was estimated at 28,000 individuals.53 At the end of the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue became the world’s largest producer of sugar and coffee, while maintaining an important production of tobacco and indigo.The size of slaveholdings increased with the expansion of plantation slavery in the West Indies as well. In the late eighteenth century, there was an average number of 185 enslaved workers in sugar plantations in Saint-Domingue. The use of an enslaved workforce also increased in Jamaica, even though estimates in terms of size of slaveholdings vary. Plantation inventories show that between 1725 and 1784, only 5 percent of Jamaica’s sugar plantations had more than 150 enslaved workers. Yet most enslaved people toiled on plantations with large slaveholdings that ultimately dominated the island’s economy.54 Also in Jamaica, approximately 60 percent of the enslaved workers labored in the fields, while nearly 35 percent carried out specialized professions, and just 4 percent performed domestic activities. Both in Jamaica and in Martinique, enslaved women worked in significant numbers in the sugarcane fields. Although bondsmen exclusively performed land clearance tasks, such as removing trees and stones, all other activities were carried out by enslaved men and women of all ages.
Although hard to determine, morbidity is also an important indicator to evaluate the work and living conditions of enslaved populations in the Americas. But over the course of three centuries of plantation slavery, the mortality rate among enslaved people in Brazil and West Indies obviously varied. Certainly, in the plantations of Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, and Brazil, mortality was much higher than natural growth.55 The highest mortality rate was among African-born bondspeople, as well as enslaved newborns and children, which explains in part why slave owners heavily relied on imports of new African captives to provide the required work on sugar plantations. A variety of factors such as poor diet and disease lowered the life expectancy of enslaved people, but working conditions were also a key factor. During the harvest period, bondspeople worked extremely hard for between twelve and sixteen hours a day on sugarcane plantations located in the hot and humid tropical Brazilian northeast region or in the French and British West Indies. As Vincent Brown reminds us, in Jamaica, where the working conditions on sugar estates were extremely hard, high mortality led slave owners to rely on vast imports of African captives as well, a choice considered cheaper than to “rear Negro children.â€56 Likewise, in Saint-Domingue, an eighteenth-century observer emphasized that slaves were “always dying.â€57 But on tobacco and cotton plantations in the United States and in coffee estates in Brazil, where the working conditions were less harsh, life expectancy was higher, and therefore natural growth existed without the overreliance on slave imports from Africa.