Saint-Domingue’s abrupt abolition forced administrators to invent a labor regime

Evidence

In one way, the draconian regime whose consolidation it articulated turned out to be quite a success: Louverture oversaw a remarkable revival of the shattered plantation economy in Saint-Domingue. By 1801, according to official reports, coffee exports had risen from almost nothing to twothirds of their level in 1789. Improvements in the sugar industry, where damages were more difficult to repair, were smaller, and included little of the more profitable refined sugar, but by 1802 exports were at one-third those of 1789. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 885 (#expands, via linked claim)

To preserve emancipation, Louverture decided that he must preserve the plantation economy and encourage the return of white planters who had fled. Locked in conflict with ex-slaves who had a very different vision of what freedom should mean, he maintained and perfected a coercive system that sought to keep them working on plantations. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 28 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The formal endings of slave systems of production in the nineteenth century marked the beginnings of a profound reorganization of the capitalist world system. In Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, through the deepening penetrations of monopoly capitalism and the impositions of hegemonic colonialisms, slaves were displaced as a source of cheap labor power by peasants and migrant laborers. In Africa, whereas the slave trade had dislocated the reproductive cycles of certain social formations along the coasts of West and southern Africa, the “new imperialism” of monopoly capitalism demanded a more destructive form of appropriation and exploitation. The colonial state parasitized the peasants of the continent’s agrarian hinterlands, transforming traditional economic sectors from the project of reproduction into the source and support of forcibly recruited labor and the sites of cash-crop monoculture and the extraction of minerals and raw materials. To the extent that wage labor expanded in Africa, its level of support was limited to maintenance and not reproduction of labor. In the New World there were also changes. The systems of reconstitution of Black communities were, as well, assaulted by forms of forced labor: peonage, share-cropping, and less than subsistence farming. Moreover, Black workers were subject to displacement from productive land and to publicly and privately organized campaigns of terror and intimidation. Ineluctably, resistance was propelled toward new forms, new consciousness, and new ideologies. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Louverture’s forced-labor regime revived the Saint-Domingue plantation economy — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 885; In postemancipation Saint-Domingue planters were at the mercy of former slaves; Louverture preserved emancipation by coercing ex-slaves to keep working plantations — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 28 (+4 more)

Related

• Louverture’s forced-labor regime revived the Saint-Domingue plantation economy (similarity 0.92)
• Louverture forgave planters partly to rebuild the plantation economy. (similarity 0.89)
• The Atlantic sugar economy forced Louverture to restrict emancipation for economic survival (similarity 0.88)
• Louverture’s plantation regime resembled slavery, differing mainly in paid wages (similarity 0.88)
• Louverture equated disorder with idleness and demanded child labor on plantations (similarity 0.88)
• Louverture preserved emancipation by coercing ex-slaves to keep working plantations (similarity 0.86)
• Louverture rebuilt the colony’s economy but could not secure lasting peace (similarity 0.84)
• Louverture forced freed people to stay working on the plantations, opposing their own aspirations (similarity 0.83)
• Saint-Domingue was the first postemancipation society in the Americas with abrupt abolition (similarity 0.83)
• Toussaint Louverture preserved emancipation by coercing former slaves to labor (similarity 0.83)
• Louverture withheld abolition from Spanish Santo Domingo’s enslaved population (similarity 0.83)
• Louverture’s plantation labor system reproduced slavery’s coercion despite wages. (similarity 0.82)
• Old planters exploited Louverture’s labor decree to threaten re-enslavement (similarity 0.82)
• Emancipation in Saint-Domingue demanded renewed compulsory labor from the freed (similarity 0.82)
• Ex-slaves had to surrender freedom to work as cultivators to defend emancipation. (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Louverture’s forced-labor regime revived the Saint-Domingue plantation economy #expands (0.72) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 885
• Louverture preserved emancipation by coercing ex-slaves to keep working plantations #corroborates (0.65) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 28
• In postemancipation Saint-Domingue planters were at the mercy of former slaves #contradicts (0.55)
• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms #expands (0.55) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434
• Colonial officials framed obligatory labor as overriding individual freedom in the name of progress #expands (0.45) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 742