“The most dramatic of all slave revolts occurred in the French island colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). This was France’s major sugar-producing island. Plantation production had increased so rapidly in the late eighteenth century that, by the early 1790s, Saint-Domingue contained some 400,000 slaves. Under the leadership of one of their number, known by the French name of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose against and killed their white French masters in 1791.”