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Haiti Colonial Society: The Conflicts of Color and Class
By the mid-eighteenth century, a territory largely
neglected
under Spanish rule had become the richest and most coveted
colony
in the Western Hemisphere. By the eve of the French
Revolution,
Saint-Domingue produced about 60 percent of the world's
coffee
and about 40 percent of the sugar imported by France and
Britain.
Saint-Domingue played a pivotal role in the French
economy,
accounting for almost two-thirds of French commercial
interests
abroad and about 40 percent of foreign trade. The system
that
provided such largess to the mother country, such luxury
to
planters, and so many jobs in France had a fatal flaw,
however.
That flaw was slavery.
The origins of modern Haitian society lie within the
slaveholding system. The mixture of races that eventually
divided
Haiti into a small, mainly mulatto elite and an
impoverished
black majority began with the slavemasters' concubinage of
African women. Today Haiti's culture and its predominant
religion
(voodoo) stem from the fact that the majority of slaves in
SaintDomingue were brought from Africa. (The slave population
totalled
at least 500,000, and perhaps as many as 700,000, by
1791.) Only
a few of the slaves had been born and raised on the
island. The
slaveholding system in Saint-Domingue was particularly
cruel and
abusive, and few slaves (especially males) lived long
enough to
reproduce. The racially tinged conflicts that have marked
Haitian
history can be traced similarly to slavery.
While the masses of black slaves formed the foundation
of
colonial society, the upper strata evolved along lines of
color
and class. Most commentators have classified the
population of
the time into three groups: white colonists, or
blancs;
free blacks (usually mulattoes, or gens de
couleur--people
of color), or affranchis; and the slaves
(see Social Structure
, ch. 7).
Conflict and resentment permeated the society of SaintDomingue . Beginning in 1758, the white landowners, or
grands
blancs, discriminated against the affranchis
through
legislation. Statutes forbade gens de couleur from
taking
up certain professions, marrying whites, wearing European
clothing, carrying swords or firearms in public, or
attending
social functions where whites were present. The
restrictions
eventually became so detailed that they essentially
defined a
caste system. However, regulations did not restrict the
affranchis' purchase of land, and some eventually
accumulated substantial holdings. Others accumulated
wealth
through another activity permitted to affranchis by
the
grands blancs--in the words of historian C.L.R.
James,
"The privilege of lending money to white men." The
mounting debt
of the white planters to the gens de couleur
provided
further motivation for racial discrimination.
Data as of December 1989
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