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aged 14 or 15, without a beard,”
    who was found by police in 1779; a surgeon determined that he had died of
    misère —poverty—and he was buried anonymously in a local graveyard.30
    The second half of the eighteenth century saw Saint-Domingue’s popu-
    lation and economy expand dramatically. With France’s cession of Canada
    to the British in 1763, the Caribbean became the main destination for
    Frenchmen seeking their fortune in the Americas. Saint-Domingue, with
    its reputation for transforming colonists into rich men, was the most attrac-
    tive in the region. During these decades a new plantation crop boomed:
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    av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
    coffee. Coffee plantations were less expensive to start up and maintain
    than sugar plantations, and they had another important advantage: they
    could be established in the mountainous regions of Saint-Domingue,
    where there was still land available. Mountainous terrain, accounting for
    60 percent of the colony, was useless for cultivating sugar. Thus the coffee
    boom did not compete with the continuing sugar boom. Instead, it added
    to the already enormous wealth produced in the colony. By the eve of
    the revolution Saint-Domingue was “the world’s leading producer of both
    sugar and coffee.” It exported “as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil
    combined” and half of the world’s coffee, making it “the centerpiece of the
    Atlantic slave system.”31
    Three-quarters of sugar and coffee produced in the colonies and sent
    to France was reexported to other countries in Europe. Because restrictive
    French trade policies kept the prices planters could demand for their
    products down, metropolitan merchants in the port towns made extraordi-
    nary fortunes from this business. The livelihood of as many as a million
    of the 25 million inhabitants of France depended directly on the colo-
    nial trade. The slave colonies of the Caribbean were an engine for eco-
    nomic and social change in metropolitan France. The historian Jean Jaurès
    pointed out the “sad irony” that the fortunes created in Nantes and Bor-
    deaux during the eighteenth century were a crucial part of the struggle
    for “human emancipation” that erupted in the French Revolution. Many
    among the bourgeoisie who were frustrated with the limits placed on them
    by the Old Regime system were wealthy thanks to the sugar and coffee
    produced by slaves in the Caribbean. In 1789, 15 percent of the 1,000
    members of the National Assembly owned colonial property, and many
    others were probably tied to colonial commerce. The slaves of Saint-
    Domingue who had helped lay the foundation for the French Revolution
    would ultimately make it their own, and even surpass it, in their own strug-
    gle for liberty.32
    A passenger arriving by ship from France in the late eighteenth century
    would generally journey along the coast, first of Spanish Santo Domingo,
    and then of the French colony. If it was night there would be lights shin-
    ing from the plantation houses and flames dancing in the mills, where,
    wrote Moreau, “the sugar crystals that are the principal richness of the col-
    ony, and which bring us so much enjoyment, are being prepared.” Aboard
    ship, everyone would be changing into clean clothes saved for the landing.
    s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e
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    Reaching the port of Le Cap, the ship would anchor, and the passengers
    would descend into small boats to be carried into the harbor: “What a
    spectacle! How different from the places left behind! One sees four or five
    black or darkened faces for every white one. The clothes, the houses . . .
    have a new character.”33
    For residents of Le Cap, a ship from France meant the arrival of goods
    and news from across the Atlantic. On Sundays, in the area called the
    “marché des blancs” (the “white market”), sailors trying to supplement
    their meager salaries offered for sale treasures they had brought from
    France: dry goods,