Non-plantation communities survived in Saint-Domingue until planters expelled them

Evidence

Along the coasts, other small communities existed outside the world of the plantations. Moreau described a group in the south as “amphibious beings” whose lives as farmers and sailors recalled those of the colony’s early settlers. At the estuary of the Artibonite River there was a “kind of Republic” composed of men who worked as saltmakers and had renounced marriage, and whose property could not be inherited by their offspring but must instead be returned to the community. In the late eighteenth century local plantation owners, disgruntled by the presence of a community that “was a source of problems for the discipline of their negroes,” managed to expel the saltmakers from their land, to which they had no official title. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 80

Categorization

• XREF: Pre-plantation communal property that conflicts with plantation discipline recalls the enclosures and commons-eviction dynamics in European economic history.
• DEFINE: The saltmakers’ collective property model is an overlooked alternative social form in the slave colony’s landscape.