Undated: (Sugarcane, the Crop That Built the Wealth of Colonial Saint-Domingue on the Bodies of Enslaved Africans Under the Brutal “Planter’s Policy” That Wo…

Undated: (Sugarcane, the Crop That Built the Wealth of Colonial Saint-Domingue on the Bodies of Enslaved Africans Under the Brutal “Planter’s Policy” That Worked People to Death as a Business Model, and Whose Legacy Still Shapes Haitian Labor Migration to Dominican Cane Fields): Sugarcane is the crop that made Saint-Domingue the richest colony in the Caribbean, and every grain of that wealth was produced by enslaved African labor. Columbus brought sugarcane to Hispaniola on his second voyage, and by the eighteenth century, French planters had built a sugar economy of staggering profitability using a system called Planter’s Policy, which held that it was cheaper to work an enslaved person to death and buy a replacement than to provide adequate care. That calculation was not metaphorical. It was the operating logic of the plantation, and it is why the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue had to be constantly replenished through the transatlantic trade. One consequence of this brutality was that the enslaved were never fully assimilated into colonial culture, which preserved African languages, spiritual practices, and social structures in ways that would prove decisive during the Revolution. The Revolution itself destroyed many plantations and shattered the sugar economy. In the nineteenth century, Haitians partially rebuilt sugarcane production, but the industry never recovered its colonial scale. Since the early twentieth century, many Haitians have migrated to the Dominican Republic and Cuba to cut cane, performing labor that Dominicans refuse because of the low wages, harsh conditions, and the stigma of work historically associated with slavery. That migration continues today. The full arc of sugarcane in Haiti traces a line from colonial extraction through revolutionary destruction to postcolonial labor exploitation, with Haitian bodies at every point along the way.