The Haitian Revolution directly enabled the Louisiana Purchase and Cuba’s sugar boom

Evidence

Even as Haiti struggled, the ramifications of its revolution reshaped the world around it. The victory of the black troops of Saint-Domingue paved the way for the Louisiana Purchase. Bonaparte’s mission to the colony had been the centerpiece of a new colonial policy aimed at reinvigorating the French presence in the Americas—Louisiana was meant to supply food for the reconstructed plantation society of Saint-Domingue—and when it was crushed he had little choice but to give up his ambitions, to the profit of an expanding United States. As a result slavery thrived and expanded in North America during the next decades. In the Caribbean, planters and administrators in Cuba stepped into the vacuum created by the destruction of what had been the most important supplier of the world’s sugar. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 1069

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — a revolution against slavery creating the conditions for slavery’s expansion in North America and Cuba — is a genuinely counterintuitive causal chain central to any full understanding of the revolution’s world-shaping arc.