Saint-Domingue was the most productive colony the modern world had known

Evidence

By 1790, Haiti was perhaps the most productive colony the modern world had known. Its sugar, coffee, indigo, and tobacco production was said to be greater than the total for British North America. And what the British West Indies had done for the economies of Bristol, Manchester, and the like, Saint-Domingue did for Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Orleans, Dieppe, Bercy-Paris, and another “dozen great towns.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 725

Categorization

• XREF: Places the wealth generated by slave labor at the heart of European industrial capitalism — resonates with the reader’s causal interest in how the system the tradition opposed was built.