Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously
successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies.
These plantation regimes were, to adopt a metaphor of the era, complex
"machines," finely tuned over time by planters, merchants, and officials
to become more efficient at exploiting their enslaved workers and
serving their empires. Using a wide range of archival evidence, The
Plantation Machine traces a critical half-century in the development of
the social, economic, and political frameworks that made these societies
possible. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus find deep and unexpected
similarities in these two prize colonies of empires that fought each
other throughout the period. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue experienced, at
nearly the same moment, a bitter feud between planters and governors, a
violent conflict between masters and enslaved workers, a fateful
tightening of racial laws, a steady expansion of the slave trade, and
metropolitan criticism of planters' cruelty.
The core of The Plantation Machine addresses the Seven Years' War and
its aftermath. The events of that period, notably a slave poisoning
scare in Saint-Domingue and a near-simultaneous slave revolt in Jamaica,
cemented white dominance in both colonies. Burnard and Garrigus argue
that local political concerns, not emerging racial ideologies, explain
the rise of distinctive forms of racism in these two societies. The
American Revolution provided another imperial crisis for the
beneficiaries of the plantation machine, but by the 1780s whites in each
place were prospering as never before--and blacks were suffering in new
and disturbing ways. The result was that Jamaica and Saint-Domingue
became vitally important parts of the late eighteenth-century American
empires of Britain and France.
