ABSTRACT
The French conquest of western Hispaniola began in 1660 with the capture of the Ile de la Tortue, a tiny island off the northern coast of the mainland. French encroachments on the island caused several military encounters with the Spanish in 1681 and 1690 and with the English and Spanish in 1695. To finance the companies, the French government relied on contributions from wealthy aristocrats, and merchants. In 1698, France turned over, the entire southern peninsula of the island to a national monopoly company, the Saint-Domingue Company, because settlers had failed to migrate to that part of the colony. Small-scale tobacco production predominated in Saint-Domingue until 1680. Though the predominance of slave labor relations in Saint-Domingue made it a non-capitalist society strictus sensus, it was fully integrated into and dominated by the larger capitalist world-economy. With the loss of Saint-Domingue, the slave and colonial trades ceased to be the most important source of capital accumulation for the French merchant bourgeoisie.
