The Conceptual Tools Of The Plantation

Saint-Domingue - the colony that became Haiti - was history's most profitable slave society and its most deadly. By 1789, this Caribbean colony produced 40% of the world's sugar and 60% of its coffee, enslaved nearly 500,000 Africans, and generated one-third of France's foreign trade revenue. Six theoretical frameworks illuminate how this system operated and why it collapsed in the only successful slave revolution in history. Each framework reveals different dimensions of the plantation machine that was simultaneously an apex of capitalist efficiency and a death-world of unimaginable brutality.