Atlantic French Slavery
Saint-Domingue sugar and the ransom of Haiti
France built its richest colony, Saint-Domingue, on one of the deadliest slave regimes in the Americas. After the enslaved won independence as Haiti, France extracted a crippling indemnity that mortgaged the new nation for over a century.
Damage
French Caribbean slavery, especially Saint-Domingue, ran extreme death regimes for sugar wealth.
Lives lost
Hundreds of thousands to over a million dead in French plantation circuits (order-of-magnitude)
Value lost
Sugar colony profits central to French Atlantic capital
Record Points
- French ships transported roughly 1.4 million Africans, most to the sugar and coffee estates of the Caribbean.
- Saint-Domingue mortality was so high that the colony required constant imports to maintain its workforce.
- Napoleon reinstated slavery in 1802 after the Revolution had abolished it, triggering renewed war.
- In 1825 France forced independent Haiti to pay 150 million francs under naval threat to compensate former slaveholders.
- Servicing that debt to French banks drained Haitian public finances into the twentieth century.
Perpetrator(s)
Victims
West AfricaCaribbeanHaiti