Stretching from the island of Cuba to the coast of Venezuela, the archipelago of the Antilles has traditionally been divided into several groups united around the same island structure. The Lesser Antilles are composed of small islands of volcanic rock or limestone that form an arc. The largest islands (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola — known today as Haiti and the Dominican Republic — and Puerto Rico) form the Greater Antilles. Farther north, the Keys, the Bahamas, and the islands of Turks and Caicos are grouped together under the title of Northern Caribbean islands. These islands scattered in the Caribbean Sea, “discovered” by Christopher Columbus and occupied by the Spanish, attracted the attention of other Western powers. These new territories became one of the major challenges of one nation’s quest to assert its domination on the world: control of the sea and arms opened the American territories to the claims laid by the kingdoms of western Europe, as much on a political level as an economic level, notably starting at the end of the seventeenth century.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the Antilles was the battle site between western powers that hoped to increase their economic and territorial power. Because of the islands’ location between English colonies in North America and the French and Spanish territories, the Caribbean sea was an area that was particularly coveted by Westerners: the most economically-developed islands attracted the interest of nations that saw the area as a means of domination outside of the old continent. During the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), France and England fought over Dominica, which became English. More than a decade later, Saint Vincent was taken by the French in 1779 during the war in America before being handed over to the opposing side in 1783. The nationality of the Antilles’ islands varied over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century depending on wars, treaties, and changing hands. The English gave Guadeloupe and Martinique back to France in 1763; Havana was under English rule for two years at the end of the Seven Years’ War before finally becoming a Spanish territory again during the war in America, whereas the French occupied numerous English islands (Saint Christopher Island, Nevis, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, Tobago), the majority of which were given back following a treaty in 1783.

Beyond the territorial domination, the Antilles was seen as an essential economic zone at the turn of the century: 15% of the disputes in 1789 directly concerned the Santo Domingo sugar industry.1 The economy was essentially a plantation economy that relied on the slave trade. The cultivation of sugar, which was introduced in America around the 1720’s, coffee, notably in Santo Domingo, indigo, and cotton built the territories and their ports. France dominated commerce in the Antilles thanks to the increase in the number of sugar refineries. Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Western Santo Domingo were in full development at the beginning of the 1780’s, so much so that Santo Domingo became the largest sugar and coffee producer in the world at the end of the 1780’s. England also took advantage of the transatlantic economy, firstly with Jamaica, and in 1773 nearly a quarter of British imports came from the Antilles.2

This prosperity was due first and foremost to the exploitation of black slaves bought in western Africa and taken by boat in extremely precarious conditions to the American coasts. Between the Seven Years’ War and the Revolution, the French Antilles received more than 400,000 of them.3 The lands where sugar was the major crop progressively saw their demographics dominated by people of African origin, notably in the Lesser Antilles. According to Jean-Pierre Sainton, political trouble and changes of ownership in these islands in this part of the world did not challenge the established system of slavery in these societies, notably in the Lesser Antilles: “slavery was the socio-legal system that unified and stabilized the base of the social structure of the islands.”4 To maintain this system, the nations sent truly colonial troops to the territories. In the 1770’s, the French navy kept four colonial infantry regiments in the Antilles, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Port-au-Prince, and Cap-Français.5 Yet slavery was maintained first and foremost by the slavemasters who were sometimes hard for a faraway royal power to control. In the mid-1780’s, planters in Santo Domingo opposed texts governing the working conditions of black slaves, which established in particular the right to complain about the master’s conduct. The planters also admonished the monarchy for its economic policy that forced the colonies to trade only with the home country.6 a gap began to widen between the colonists’ and mainlanders’ mentalities, especially as the strong African presence on the territories led to the emergence of new cultures, like the creole language and religious rites that were a mix of Catholicism and animism. Faced with mistreatment and torture, certain slaves ran away. Escaping seemed like a form of resistance; a few groups of fugitives armed themselves and attacked the Santo Domingo plantations before 1791. At the time of the Revolution, slavery opponents were becoming more and more vocal in France.7

In the 1780’s the Antilles was a fertile area in many ways. Fertile for the western powers who saw in the area a way to increase their domination though the territory war and the plantation economy. Fertile for the colonists who built their wealth by cultivating the lands of the New World. Yet when the system of slavery was progressively called into question and slave revolts multiplied, the organization was somewhat shaken in the islands that were occupied principally for industrial and commercial reasons. Sugar, coffee, and cotton: at the end of the eighteenth century, the Antilles asserted themselves as the source of raw materials reserved for Westerners.