8. Haiti Became France’s Most Lucrative Colonial Possession
Mass slavery transformed Haiti into the ultimate sugar island, and its profits made it the imperial engine of French economic growth. That came at a high price for the slaves, whose working conditions were horrendous. Their life expectancy was abysmally brief, routinely cut short by backbreaking toil, workplace injuries, tropical diseases, starvation, mistreatment, or outright murder by their masters. However, the slaves were expendable assets: a slave only had to live and toil for two years in order to recoup the cost of his purchase and upkeep and turn his owner a tidy profit as well.
With such brutal economic realities, and the fact that replacement slaves were readily available and relatively cheap, plantation owners had every financial incentive to work their slaves to death. The slave population grew, but unlike Britain’s North American colonies, Haiti’s slave population growth did not result from natural increase, but from the purchase of ever more slaves to replace those who had perished. By the 1780s, Haiti accounted for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade, as the settlers were in constant need of new slaves to replace those who worked to death on their plantations.
