Reconstructing the Plantation: Land Tenure in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue

On January 1, 1804, Haiti became the second independent republic in the Americas following the only successful slave revolution in history. Once the wealthiest slave colony in the continent during the eighteenth century, Haiti witnessed the collapse of the colonial plantation system, which was replaced in the early nineteenth century by peasant landholding, a structure that defines the country to this day. However, this profound transformation in land tenure was the result of a protracted and contentious process involving the diverse social groups participating in the revolution. While the primary objective of the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue was the definitive end of slavery, the actual exercise of freedom post-abolition became a site of intense contestation. Revolutionary authorities faced the dual challenge of financing the war against foreign powers and managing the transition from slavery to a regime of free labor. I argue that the colonial state—first under French commissioners and later under Toussaint Louverture—attempted to reconstruct the plantation complex by sequestering emigré lands and implementing a state-managed leasing system. However, this project clashed directly with the aspirations of the newly freed population. Former slaves resisted the continuity of the plantation model, interpreting freedom as autonomy achieved through subsistence farming and the occupation of small land plots. By focusing on land administration and the conflict over property rights, this paper examines how the revolutionary government responded to this "counter-plantation" movement with increasingly coercive legal and military measures. But it also demonstrates how the Black population of Saint-Domingue, seizing the opportunities of the revolutionary context, not only resisted this imposition but successfully enforced an alternative logic of land organization throughout the nineteenth century.