Uprooting the liberty tree: an interpretation of the Toussaint Louverture era in Santo Domingo, 1801-1802

As leader of the French Colony of Saint-Domingue from 1798-1802, Toussaint
tried to maintain at the same time formal liberty and plantation-based
economy. Records show that Toussaint had the same objectives in Santo
Domingo (the Dominican Republic today). While French Saint-Domingue in
the 18th century was the richest colony in the world with extensive plantations and around 500,000 slaves (in 1879), Santo Domingo in the same period
was very poor and had few plantations. During his administration in Santo
Domingo, Toussaint tried to create a prosperous economy in the colony with
coercive labor rules that bound former Dominican slaves to plantations.
The article makes two principle arguments. The first: that the policies of
Toussaint in Santo Domingo were motivated by a strict and conservative
definition of “liberty” and by the central goal of establishing a lucrative
plantation economy. The second: that Toussaint was only one of many
Dominican leaders who tried to impose such a plantation system on a peasant
population with very different ideas about what constituted good social and
economic organization.