ABSTRACT
In 1791 the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue became the site of the only successful slave uprising in the history of the New World. As the French Revolution reshaped the political and social institutions of the mother country, Saint-Domingue's free people of color, led by an indigo planter from the island's southern peninsula, began a campaign for civil reform that helped destabilize colonial slave society. The chapter demonstrates the wealth of Saint-Domingue's most vocal free colored planters, Julien Raimond and his neighbors in Aquin parish was not based on coffee, but on another crop-indigo. Strong foreign demand, declining official export statistics, and exceptional ease of transport all suggest that the indigo grown on the southern peninsula entered the European market through illegal channels. The profitability of the international trade in indigo was closely connected to the rise of a prosperous free colored planting class along the southern coast of Saint-Domingue, especially in the Aquin parish.
