At first many plantations were worked by a combination of African slaves and white indentured laborers. In Saint-Domingue in 1687, whites outnumbered slaves, 4,411 to 3,358. But by eighteenth century, labor in the Caribbean had been deliberately and obsessively racialized. With the exception of a few managers and overseers, plantation workforces were entirely of African descent. In Saint-Domingue by 1700, the population of slaves had grown to 9,082, while the population of whites had decreased by several hundred. As sugar plantations proliferated over the next decades, the numbers of enslaved increased dramatically; by midcentury there were nearly 150,000 slaves and fewer than 14,000 whites, and on the eve of the revolution, 90 percent of the colony's population was enslaved.

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ …, loc. 45