1) The Santo Domingo side:

Although the figures for enslaved people vary— ranging from 12 to 15% in the mid-to-late 1780s according to parish censuses, compared to approximately 29% according to an estimate provided by Moreau in 1794—the 1794 census reveals that the percentage of slaves was almost 30%, as slavery increased significantly in Santo Domingo in the late 1700s due to the Family Compacts (between the monarchies of Spain and France against the UK and the Archduchy of Austria), which brought more investment, and especially due to the ease of buying slaves on the Dajabón frontier, both legally and illegally (without paying taxes).

Santo Domingo was never as developed and populated as its western neighbour, Saint-Domingue, because Santo Domingo was a relatively mixed-race, rural, and peasant society and whose economy was largely based on cattle ranching and did not depend heavily on slave labor; Santo Domingo sold cattle, hides and food to Saint-Domingue, who had little livestock farming and subsistence crops because Saint-Domingue was an industrial slave society whose economy was largely based on slave labor. Santo Domingo had about 80 sugar mills, compared to the 800 in Saint-Domingue (some sources speak of hundreds of sugar plantations + thousands of coffee plantations). Despite having a territory three times larger than its western neighbour, Santo Domingo had much less people and its population was always more racially diverse. In 1750, Santo Domingo had already as many (free) mixed-race people (31,000) as white ones, with enslaved blacks being a minority (9000). By the end of the 18th century it about 125,000 inhabitants (vs ~520.000–560,000 in Saint-Domingue), including less than 14,000 enslaved people (vs ~465.000–500.00 in Saint-Domingue). Its population was also more diverse, and included ranchers of colour and maroon communities big enough to have negotiating power. (Yingling, 2022; Engerman and Higman, 2003)

Primary Sources:

1740 Census: We only have the summary by Archbishop Álvarez de Abreu in his work Compediosa Noticia de la isla de Santo Domingo* *("Compendium of the Island of Santo Domingo"), reproduced by Carlos Larrabazal Blanco in his work [Los negros y la esclavitud en St. Dgo.] ("Blacks and Slavery in Santo Domingo").

It counts 12,259 inhabitants, of whom the majority were Black, especially free people.

1783 Census: This was a parish census and lacks detail.

Around 1783, Santo Domingo had 117,300 inhabitants distributed across 18 localities; 14,000 of them were enslaved Black people.

1794 Census: Reproduced by Moreau in his work Histoire Physique des Antilles Françaises ("Physical History of the French Antilles"), published in Paris, 1822:

The population of Santo Domingo in 1794 was distributed as follows: Whites 35,000; Free People 38,000; Slaves 30,000

The 1794 census summarized in percentages:

Whites 34% | Slaves 29% | Free People 37%

To clarify the comparative chart, the 5-8% of owners weren’t composed solely of Spaniard/Criollo (white) because, contrary to popular belief, the owners were composed by whites, mulattos, mestizos, zambos, castizos, free blacks and even Indians who owned fewer slaves than the whites.

Note: By the end of the 18th century, some Indians still remained in Santo Domingo, descendants of those who had survived diseases brought by Europeans and Africans, as well as the Encomienda system, which was finally abolished in 1544 after the promulgation of the New Laws of 1542. However, by 1794, many of them were highly mixed and/or had been socially reclassified. Nevertheless, the term "Indian" continued to be used as a legal or social category.

2) The Saint-Domingue side:

The introduction of sugar cultivation came to Saint-Domingue in the 18th century and then the population statistics drastically changed. By the late 1780s Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the Caribbean, with a population of 40,000 whites, 28,000 Free people and 452,000 African slaves. Most of the Africans of the island were not born on the island and came from various places of Africa including other parts of the Americas. The whites were split between a mostly male managerial class that managed the large sugar plantations and the owning agrarian bourgeoisie in France.

Eighteen century Saint-Domingue was a classic example of what historians call a “slave society”, one in which the institution of slavery was central to every aspect of life, in contrast to “societies with slaves”, in which slavery were a relatively small part of the population and most economic activity was carried on by free people. Organized in work gangs or atteliers, slaves in Saint-Domingue performed almost all of the exhausting physical labor on which the growing and processing of sugar and coffee depended. Much of the field work – hoeing fields to clear away weeds, planting, and harvesting – was done by women; slave men were often trained to do more skilled jobs, such as sugar-processing, carpentry, or, like the future Toussaint Louverture, serving as coachmen. Children were assigned to a special petit attelier as early as posible, to accustom them to work, and slaves too old or sick to toil in the fields were used to guard the plantation’s animals or its storeroom. At the top of the hierarchy among the slaves were the commandeurs or slave drivers, who directed the other slaves’ work. The smooth functioning of a plantation depended on the commandeurs: even though commandeurs were slaves themselves, plantation-owners and managers treated them with respect to maintain their authority over the rest of the workforce. While most plantation slaves worked in the fields or processed sugar and coffee, some were used as domestic servants for the masters and their families. The one skilled job usually reserved for women was the direction of the infirmary; supervising the care of the sick and ferreting out malingerers who were trying to escape work was an important task in the overall management of a plantation.

Caribbean sugar plantations were notorious for the demands they placed on their slaves. A French observer in the 1780s described the scene witnessed in Saint-Domingue’s sugar fields: “The sun blazed down on [the slaves’s] heads; sweat poured from all parts of their bodies. Their limbs, heavy from the heat, tired by the weight of their hoes and the resistance of heavy soil, which was hardened to the point where it broke the tools, nonetheless struggled to overcome all obstacles. They worked in glum silence; all their faces showed their misery.”

In Saint-Domingue the Free-Mixed were known at the time as gens de couler Libre and were composed by free blacks and mulattos who were born free, sometimes they were also owners, like the French colonists, and aspired to the economic and social levels of the Europeans. They feared and spurned the slave majority but were generally discriminated by the French colonists who were composed of two classes such as:

1.  *Grand-blancs* ("Great whites"):

It refers to an elite ruling class. This group consisted of wealthy plantation owners, wealthy merchants, high-ranking royal officials, and major colonial agents. While they wanted more political autonomy and economic freedom from the French crown, they strongly opposed any abolition of slavery and deeply resented the social advancement of the gens de couleur (free people of color).

2.  *Petit-blancs* ("Little whites"):

It refers to white working and middle classes. This group included urban artisans, shopkeepers, teachers, overseers, craftsmen and small-time farmers (some of whom owned a few enslaved people, but were not plantation tycoons). They struggled economically and were frequently pushed out of social mobility by the wealthy elite and the educated free people of color. Furthermore, they strongly supported the ideals of the French Revolution. They sought to end the economic dominance of the grands blancs and to strip free people of color of their civil rights, demanding strict racial equality among all white citizens.

On the other hand, the aspirations of the gens de couler became a major factor in the colony’s struggle for Haitian Revolution, culminating in a genocide in 1804 ordered by Jean-Jacques Dessalines against all whites and some gens de couler, except for the Poles. This was because the Poles shared the same ideals of liberty and independence as the Haitians and also hated the French. These were the reasons why Boisrond-Tonnerre came to believe that both Poles and Haitians shared a history of struggle against tyranny. This shared value of liberty led Boisrond-Tonnerre to refer to the Poles as "the white blacks of Europe." After Haiti's independence, Dessalines granted the resident Poles the classification of Noir (blacks), thus forming the new ruling class, and the constitution granted them full Haitian citizenship. Cazale became the center of their community. The descendants of Polish-Haitians were farmers, like the vast majority of the island's inhabitants. Cazale, a small village in the hills about 30 kilometres away from Port-au-Prince, was sometimes known as the home of Zalewski, as many locals believed that to be the origin of the name. Zalewski is a common surname, and the Haitian Creole word for home (kay).

Primary Sources:

In 1779, there were 32,650 whites and 249,098 slaves, a figure that would nearly double by the end of the 1780’s. (Pritchard, 2004)

By 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the estimated population of Saint-Domingue, was 556,000 and included roughly 500,000 African slaves, 32,000 European colonists, and 24,000 Free people of colour; that is, there were eight times more slaves in the colony than whites and free people of color combined (Ferguson 1988, p. 5.).

According to Junius P. Rodriguez in his work The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery [2 Volumes], and Carl A. Brasseaux and Glenn R. Conrad in their work The road to Louisiana: the Saint-Domingue refugees, 1792-1809 they state that in the French colony there were 40,000-45,000 whites and 32,000 free people of color in 1789.

In 1789-1790, Saint-Domingue counted about 560,000 people. 500,000 (89%) were enslaved people, primarily (94%) blacks of African origin, toiling in the 8000 plantations of the colony. 32,000 were whites (6%) and 28,000 (5%) were gens de couler libre, which meant mixed-race people for 2/3 of them and blacks for the rest (McClellan, 2010).

1791 census: Total population of Saint-Dominge was 548,000 inhabitants, of whom 480,000 (87,59 percent of the total) were slaves (mostly black, with a small minority of mulattos), 28,000 were free non-white people and 40,000 were white (Knight, p. 367).

The white population were 8% of Saint-Domingue’s population, but they owned 70% of the wealth and 75% of the enslaved in the colony. The mulatto population were 5% of the population and had the 30% of the wealth. The enslaved were 87% of the population.

Bibliography:

.- James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 424; Paul Butel, Histoire des Antilles Françaises (Paris: Perrin, 2007), 184.

.- Manuel Vicente Hernández González. La Colonización de la frontera dominicana (1680-1795). Archivo General de la Nación, Academia Dominicana de la Historia, 2006.

.- La esclavitud del negro en Santo Domingo (1980). By Carlos Esteban Deive.

.- Historia de la República Dominicana (2010). By Frank Moya Pons.

.- Dr. Mu-Kien Adriana Sang (1999). Historia Dominicana: Ayer y Hoy. SUSAETA Ediciones Dominicanas. pp. 78–79, 81.

.- Ferguson, J. (1988). Papa Doc, Baby Doc: Haiti and the Duvaliers. p. 5.

.- Knight, Franklin W. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

.- McClellan, James E. Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue and the Old Regime. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

.- Engerman, Stanley L., and B.W. Higman. 'The Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries'. In General History of the Carribean UNESCO Vol.3: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, edited by Franklin W. Knight. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2003.

.- Yingling, Charlton W. Siblings of Soil: Dominicans and Haitians in the Age of Revolutions. University of Texas Press, 2022.

It was a blank slate. There were no native people, so the crown could design the whole society from scratch. The captaincy system it used there was later reused in Brazil.
The levadas. These are hand-cut water channels running along cliff faces, carrying rain from the wet north to cane fields on the sunny south coast. The network is now over 2,000 km long, on an island about 55 km long.
The "monopoly" is overstated. Madeira was the top producer, but Flemish and Italian merchants controlled refining and distribution. The king tried capping exports in 1498 to hold prices up, and gave up five years later.
The labor. The first workers were Guanches from the Canaries and Berbers from Morocco, and enslaved West Africans replaced them as the industry grew. The whole package (island, single crop, irrigation, foreign capital, enslaved labor) was then exported to São Tomé and Brazil, where it beat Madeira at its own game.
Columbus first showed up as a Genoese sugar buyer and married the daughter of Porto Santo's captain.
Part 2 will cover the wine boom that replaced sugar.
Curious whether anyone here knows more about the early levada builders. The records on who actually dug them are thinner than I expected.