At the start of the sixteenth century, Santo Domingo became the first plantation society in the Americas. In addition to producing copious amounts of sugar, the Spanish colony became by mid-century the first territory in the Americas to establish an economic system almost exclusively based on the exploitation of enslaved Africans. In the early seventeenth century, however, Santo Domingo’s plantation economy descended into decline and eventually collapsed. By the mid-seventeenth century, the colony had become a post-plantation society just when other parts of the Caribbean began developing larger plantation economies. This panel starts from the premise that colonial Santo Domingo not only holds the title of the first slave society but also of the first post-plantation society in the Americas, a development that foreshadowed a series of social, political, and economic processes that became pervasive in the Caribbean in the aftermath of independence and abolition centuries later.

What is more, even though Santo Domingo remained a relatively peripheral colony within the Spanish Empire and the Atlantic World more generally, its history, from the decline of the colony’s first plantation complex in the late sixteenth century to the eventual unification of the island under the Haitian Republic (1822-1844), is central to wider Atlantic historical processes, including the endurance of racial hierarchies, Afro-descendants’ tenacious resistance to slavery, the formation of a peripheral but persistent elite, and the emergence of syncretic cultural/religious forms. Paying attention to the peculiar history of this seemingly peripheral colony, this panel suggests that we cannot understand the history of the Atlantic world and the emergence of post-plantation societies in the Caribbean without placing Santo Domingo at the center.