Santo Domingo’s Unrealized Plantation Complex, 1760–95

Cuba’s ascent as the dominant sugar colony of the Atlantic world from the 1790s onwards is well known. However, historians have failed to note that Cuba’s inspiration was not Saint-Domingue, but rather Spanish Santo Domingo. By the time the Cuban plantation elite endeavored to position the island as the leading sugar colony in the Atlantic—particularly after the Haitian Revolution disrupted the world’s most profitable yet brutal sugar colony—the Santo Domingo elite had long attempted to erect a plantation complex along similar lines. In fact, the first decree for the liberalization of the slave trade was granted to Santo Domingo in 1786, years before it was extended to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela in 1789. It is, therefore, not surprising that the main architect of Cuba’s sugar revolution, Francisco de Arango y Parreño, made his debt to Santo Domingo explicit in his correspondence with the court. This paper interrogates Santo Domingo’s efforts to erect a plantation complex in the eighteenth century and demonstrates that the political origins of Cuba’s sugar revolution are to be found in Santo Domingo’s plantation dreams, unrealized though they remained.