In the early 18th century, France turned to its New World colonies to help rescue the monarchy from the wartime debts of Louis XIV. This short-lived scheme ended in the first global stock market crash, known as the Mississippi Bubble. Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was indelibly marked by the crisis, given its centrality in the slave-trading monopoly controlled by the French East Indies Company.
Rising prices for enslaved people and devaluation of the Spanish silver supply triggered a diffuse rebellion that broke the company’s monopoly and paved the way for what planters conceived as “free trade.”
In “The Colony and the Company”, Malick Ghachem describes how the crisis that began in financial centers abroad reverberated throughout Haiti. Beginning on the margins of white society before spreading to wealthy planters, the revolt also created political openings for Jesuit missionaries and people of color.
