Saint-Domingue’s colonists were more creole than French in interests and identity

Evidence

Saint-Domingue survived and thrived because its settlers flouted the regulations imposed on them from Paris, trading consistently with their British and Spanish neighbors— especially during times of war. Colonists had different interests from those of the royal governments that controlled them and the metropolitan merchants with whom they traded. They had more in common with British sugar planters in Jamaica than with their cousins in Paris or Bordeaux. … The term “creole”—a descriptor that referred to something that was born in the Americas, and could be applied as much to animals and plants as to people, and as well to those of European descent as to those of African descent—captures this difference. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 128

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

Related

• Saint-Domingue’s prosperity flowed from defying metropolitan trade regulation (similarity 0.94)
• Regional isolation preserved distinct creole dialects and customs in southern Saint-Domingue. (similarity 0.86)
• Saint-Domingue’s slaves were mostly African, making the revolution partly an African revolution (similarity 0.81)
• Saint-Domingue grew from frontier into the world’s most valuable colony within a century (similarity 0.81)
• African-born slaves outnumbered creoles on the eve of the revolution. (similarity 0.81)
• More than half of the colony’s population was Africa-born on revolution’s eve (similarity 0.81)
• Scholars insist Saint-Domingue was central to Western civilization, not marginal (similarity 0.80)
• Saint-Domingue’s history belongs at the center of Western civilization, not its margins (similarity 0.80)
• Slave insurgents, not French commissioners, drove Saint-Domingue’s transformation. (similarity 0.79)
• Enslaved people coined the colonial racial vocabulary that structured Saint-Domingue’s hierarchy (similarity 0.79)
• Moreau’s exile-era writing captured a colony already transformed by revolution. (similarity 0.79)
• The Haitian Revolution was itself largely an African revolution (similarity 0.78)
• European invaders recruited slave insurgents as allies to conquer Saint-Domingue cheaply. (similarity 0.78)
• Saint-Domingue’s workforce became violently racialized within a century (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial planters’ smuggling undermined French imperial authority in Saint-Domingue (similarity 0.78)