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African American Slaves In The Caribbean In 1789

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In 1789 Saint-Domingue produced 60% of the world's coffee and 40% of the world's sugar imported by France and Britain. The colony was the most profitable possession of the French Empire. Saint-Domingue was also the wealthiest and most prosperous colony, for the plantation owners at least, of all the colonies in the Caribbean.
In 1789, whites numbered 32,000; mulattoes and free blacks, 28,000; and dark slaves, an expected 452,000. The most reduced class of society was oppressed blacks, who dwarfed whites and free non-white individuals by an edge of ten to one. The slave populace on the island totaled portion of the one million slaves in the Caribbean by 1789. 66% were African-conceived, and they had a tendency to be less tame than those conceived in the Americas. The passing rate in the Caribbean surpassed the conception rate, so imports of subjugated Africans were important to keep up the numbers required to work the estates. The slave populace declined at a yearly rate of two to five percent, because of workaholic behavior, lacking nourishment and sanctuary, deficient dress and medicinal consideration, and an irregularity between the genders, with a greater number of men than ladies. A few slaves were of a creole exclusive class of urban slaves and domestics, who filled in as cooks, individual workers and artisans …show more content…

Around that time, colonial legislations, concerned with this growing and strengthening population, passed discriminatory laws that visibly differentiated these freedmen by dictating their clothing and where they could live. These laws also barred them from occupying many public offices. Many of these freedmen were also artisans and overseers, or domestic servants in the plantation houses. Le Cap Français, a northern port, had a large population of freed slaves, and these men would later become important leaders in the 1791 slave rebellion and later

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