The French colony of Saint Domingue occupied the western third of the island of Hispaniola. Its sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations produced fantastic wealth, making it the most lucrative European colony in the Americas. The motor for this wealth was the labor of a half-million black slaves, more than half of whom had been born in Africa.
As Bell, the author of a trilogy of novels about the Haitian Revolution, ably demonstrates, the society of Saint Domingue in the late 18th century was extraordinarily complex, ethnically, socially, and politically. Most of the colony's wealth was concentrated in the hands of the large plantation owners, the so-called grands blancs, who were generally royalist in their politics. A class of striving white merchants and artisans known as the petits blancs tended to support the emerging French Revolution while remaining invested in the slave system. There also existed a significant group of mixed European and African ancestry, the gens du couleur, for the most part the descendants of grand blanc slave masters and slave women.
The gens du couleur, too, were often planters and slave owners with significant, if ambiguous, ties to their grand blanc relatives. While they fought for their own equality, the gens du couleur were often ambivalent at best about the rights of the black majority that formed more than 85 percent of the population. Even this black majority was divided between a small group of those who either had been born free or had gained their freedom and the vastly greater number who labored in slavery. The former group, which included Toussaint (who learned to read and write at an early age), often rivaled the gens du couleur economically while retaining an inferior social status. The black majority was also divided between the somewhat larger portion that had been born in Africa and the creoles born on the island.
