The dramatic rise of a free colored population in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue is one of the more remarkable stories of early modern Atlantic history. From a figure of 500 (or 3.6 percent of the colony’s total population) in 1700, the gens de couleur population grew to 1,573 (3 percent) in 1715, about 5,500 (2.4 percent) in 1764, and no less than 27,548 (5.2 percent) on the eve of the French Revolution. More revealing are the figures for the growth of the free colored community relative to the size of the white population. The gens de couleur community was a mere 4.8 percent of the size of the white population in 1681, 12.3 percent in 1700, 33.5 percent in 1764, and 89.4 percent in 1789. (When the French Revolution broke out, the slave population of Saint-Domingue stood at 465,429 and the white population at 30,826.)It was not simply the growth in absolute and relative terms of the gens de couleur population that set Saint-Domingue apart, however, but also the concomitant rise in their economic and political power, particularly in the three decades between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the onset of the Revolution. Only Jamaica and Brazil compare in the extent to which they fostered a significant community of wealthy planters of African descent.

The story told by these numbers and by the politicization of the gens de couleur in the pre-revolutionary period is a relatively familiar one, at least within the confines of Caribbean history. By contrast, the legal and administrative struggles that went on in the background of this long eighteenth-century story – the Old Regime battles over the regulation of manumission – are much less well known. Set against its colonial administrative backdrop, the narrative of the rise of the gens de couleur appears much less inevitable, and far more paradoxical, than it seems from our post-revolutionary point of view. The effect of the revolution was to make freedom the ideological norm and slavery the exception to the rule. From an eighteenth-century point of view, by contrast, freedom was the “problem” that needed to be explained, the truth that had not yet (at least in this corner of the Atlantic world) become self-evident.