Slaves outnumbered whites nearly fifteen to one in Saint-Domingue by 1789.

Evidence

In 1789, according to official figures, there were roughly 465,000 slaves in the colony, 31,000 whites, and 28,000 free-coloreds. Masters, who were taxed on the basis of the number of slaves they owned, had an interest in underreporting the true numbers, so that it is likely that the slave population was higher, probably near a half-million. (The United States, in contrast, had a total population of 700,000 slaves in 1790.) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 115

Categorization

• XREF: The population imbalance that made revolution possible — and the tax-incentive underreporting skewing official figures — connects to the undercount problems I’ve seen in colonial demographic sources.
• QUESTION: How did the plantation census incentives distort all official colonial statistics, and to what extent do modern accounts of the colony’s size rely on unreliable counts?