Condorcet’s smallholder alternative was never considered in favor of plantation rebuilding.

Evidence

There was, perhaps, an alternative to maintaining plantation agriculture. The abolitionist Condorcet had suggested that as slavery was dismantled, small plots of land could be distributed to the former slaves, who would grow cane individually, and then bring it to state-run mills for processing and export. Louverture, however, like other French administrators, never truly considered this alternative, which certainly would have involved both costs and risks that perhaps seemed too much to bear. Instead he decided that it was vital to rebuild the plantation economy, whatever the costs, for the costs of not doing so would be even greater. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 665

Categorization

• QUESTION: What would have happened if Haiti had gone smallholder? A counterfactual worth exploring for the post-independence trajectory.