Social Mobility among Plantation Employees in West Province, Saint-Domingue, 1710–63

After the loss of Quebec in 1763, Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti) became France's most populous overseas possession. A flood of poorer whites flooded the colony looking for work, causing increased socioeconomic tension between whites and free people of color. The colonial administration exploited this tension through policies that curtailed the rights of free people of color and pleased the poorer whites, a tactic that resulted in civil war. This paper, for the first time in the study of Saint-Domingue, focuses on the socioeconomic relationship between poorer whites, free people of color, and the white elite in West Province before and during the Seven Years War (1754-1763). Employment on a sugar, coffee, or indigo plantation was the main path towards social respectability and economic power. Poorer whites and free people of color alike worked as overseers, bookkeepers, and managers, jobs in which they could gain the trust of their employer and, eventually, access to enough wealth to set up their own plantation. This pattern of training, mobility, and the establishment of new properties in the frontier regions of West Province fueled the rise of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, which became the most productive colony in the world, growing two-fifths of the world's sugar and half of its coffee. Drawing upon notary and parish records from Port-au-Prince and Léogane and obituaries from the colony's weekly newspaper, this paper narrates the creation of patronage networks between members of the white elite, poorer whites, and free people of color in the early eighteenth century. These networks dictated the norms of social mobility and shaped the creation of the plantation system and the formation of racial attitudes. The post-1763 intrusions of unskilled migrants and machinating officials brusquely ended this “tradition,” but it lived on, idealized, in the polemics of the revolutionary era.