Ex-slave landlords replaced whites as the new plantation owners in Saint-Domingue

Evidence

The renting of abandoned plantations therefore incited the “transfer of colonial property” and began a “radical social revolution”: it “gave birth to a new property-owning class, and therefore a new managerial class” made up of individuals of African descent. The conflict over plantation labor thus grew more complicated, for it now often involved a struggle between ex-slave workers and ex-slave managers and owners. The seeds of new kinds of social conflict that would haunt postindependence Haiti had been planted. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 712

Categorization

• XREF: This echoes the modern land-reform struggles of places like Zimbabwe and relates to the broader postcolonial land question; also connects to Dubois’s theme of ‘new elites’ preserving plantation labor.
• SEED: Article angle: how the Haitian land revolution sowed the very class conflict that would haunt post-independence Haiti—a template for postcolonial nation-building dilemmas.