Saint-Domingue’s administrators created racial categories by relabeling existing families as non-white

Evidence

This state of affairs changed in the 1760s. Bagasse began to be identified consistently as a mulâtresse (mulatto) in notarial documents, while the young Julien Raimond was described as a “quadroon”—a person of one-quarter African ancestry. In the parish of Aquin, where the Raimond family lived, there was a remarkable surge in the free-colored population not because of a baby boom or migration, but because administrators began applying racial terms where they had not done so before. Individuals and families were in effect transformed from white to mulatto or quadroon. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 216

Categorization

• QUESTION: What political or economic pressures drove administrators to start applying racial terms in the 1760s specifically?
• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on race as a social/legal construction rather than biological given.