The coffee boom expanded rather than displaced sugar production in Saint-Domingue

Evidence

Coffee plantations were less expensive to start up and maintain than sugar plantations, and they had another important advantage: they could be established in the mountainous regions of Saint-Domingue, where there was still land available. Mountainous terrain, accounting for 60 percent of the colony, was useless for cultivating sugar. Thus the coffee boom did not compete with the continuing sugar boom. Instead, it added to the already enormous wealth produced in the colony. By the eve of the revolution Saint-Domingue was “the world’s leading producer of both sugar and coffee.” It exported “as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined” and half of the world’s coffee, making it “the centerpiece of the Atlantic slave system.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Complements familiar sugar-plantation history by showing how mountainous terrain (60% of the colony) was absorbable into a second cash crop, scaling the slave colony.