ABSTRACT
Not at all surprisingly, the French colony at the western end of Hispaniola played a key role in forming the fundamental commercial and trade policies of eighteenth-century Western Europe. The development and growth of Santo Domingo’s western neighbor, called Saint-Domingue, naturally found itself very closely linked to such policies, especially in terms of territorial expansion and the frantic search for untapped markets. The whole of the Caribbean was already well in the throes of being transformed into a multitude of quite profitable single-crop export factories. This transformation was made possible by the rigid institution of slavery by the time that France jumped into the open-competition fray in the late seventeenth century. However late France entered the scramble for high-yield Caribbean profits—and indeed it was rather late—she nevertheless managed to equal, then ultimately surpass, her envious rivals in sugar and coffee production.
