A Tale of Two Coffee Colonies: Environment and Slavery in Suriname and Saint-Domingue, ca. 1750–1790

Abstract

AbstractIn the second half of the eighteenth century, European metropolitan powers succeeded in overcoming the dominance that Yemen had hitherto exercised over the world coffee supply. Two colonies of the New World stood out in this transformation, both employing African slave labor on a large scale: Suriname, owned by the Dutch, and Saint-Domingue, the main French colony in the Caribbean. However, Suriname’s growth was short-lived, and it was soon surpassed by the productive leap of Saint-Domingue. The article explores the divergent trajectories of these two colonies, focusing on the environmental conditions of the operation of coffee plantations. Rather than taking the specific combinations of land, labor, capital, and political power as an independent and locally determined set, the article examines how the coffee trajectories of Suriname and Saint-Domingue were mutually formative through the specific evolving relationships that each space had within the world-system.