The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica

A comparative plantation history of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica arguing that the integrated sugar estate was a coordinated industrial regime — a 'plantation machine' joining field labor, mills, boiling houses, livestock, time discipline, credit, slave imports, and racial management into one apparatus for converting African captivity into export commodities. The book provides one of the best large-scale prehistories of the Haitian Revolution, clarifying what had been built in Saint-Domingue by 1789 and why that order, though apparently powerful, remained brittle. Stronger than most plantation histories at the intersection of wealth, urban civic life, imperial war, and the hardening of racial legislation.