Indigoterie, Haiti
Indigoterie, Haiti,
from Labat, Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l'Amerique...,
vol.2 (La
Haye, 1724).
Courtesy of the New York Public Library,
Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Archives Division.
The plantation economies were based on several major crops including cotton,
coffee, tobacco, indigo, and sugar. In the Caribbean and South America,
sugar plantations created the greatest demand for African labor from the
sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, profits
from the trade in slaves and slave-produced sugar made Haiti the richest
European colony in the Americas. Farming methods perfected during slavery,
such as the Haitian kombit (a rotating
cooperative approach to planting and harvesting, usually organized spontaneously),
continued well into the twentieth century.