The threat of dying was not high enough to discourage impoverished aristocrats from making a quick livre, but it wasn’t low enough for them to bring their families over and settle down forever. As a result, plantations were run to maximize short-term profit. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the treatment of enslaved Africans. More than half of all enslaved Africans died within five years of arriving in Saint-Domingue—not from yellow fever but from overwork, malnutrition and crowded, unsanitary conditions which made them susceptible to dysentery, typhoid and tetanus.
