French merchant houses came to own many Saint-Domingue plantations through foreclosure

Evidence

Most plantation owners took out loans from merchant houses in France to get started. If all went well, these loans could be paid off over time and the planter could grow wealthy. But in many cases the planters failed, and the merchant houses acquired the plantations that had been the collateral for their loans. By the end of the eighteenth century, many merchant houses in France’s major port towns of Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochelle owned plantations in Saint-Domingue. These were managed by salaried administrators and overseers. Many young men came to the colony seeking such positions, but despite the booming economy there were not enough of them, and those who failed swelled the ranks of poor and unemployed whites. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 81

Categorization

• XREF: Metropolitan credit increasingly owning colonial assets anticipates the pattern of absentee ownership in Jamaica and other Caribbean colonies.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 81