Here's three recommendations for you, all recently published, well done studies of the French colony of Saint Domingue:

• Ghachem, Malick. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

• McClellan, James E. Colonialism and Science: St. Domingue in the Old Regime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

• Popkin, Jeremy. You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

If your high school somehow provides access to academic articles, or you know someone at a university who does, you could also check out an article by Geggus which will help fill in some details about where most of the slaves came from and what jobs they performed (it's not all sugar):

• Geggus, David O. “The French Slave Trade: An Overview.” William and Mary Quarterly, Jan. 2001, pp. 119-38

For a broader view of the colony of Saint Domingue and how it fit into French networks of empire I would recommend a book by Kenneth Banks. The book is not about Saint Domingue specifically, but about the connections between France and all of its American colonies with the focus on communication, power, and authority as they moved between France and the colonies, including Saint Domingue.

• Banks, Kenneth. Chasing Empire Across the Seas: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.

If you have even more time to read and want to look at the British colony of Jamaica which sits very near the French colony and in close competition with it for laborers and markets I would recommend Brown's book on death in the Atlantic World. It is very well done and could have provide some comparative perspective on Saint Domingue verses Jamaica- two of the biggest and most deadly slave colonies in the Americas.

• Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden; Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2008.

And finally, if you want a book that deals with French culture/society and slavery here an is interesting book by Madeleine Dobie that deals with the culture of forgetting in France and seeks to address the silence in French sources from the period on the slave colonies in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean.

• Dobie, Madeleine. Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-century French Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Place, 2010.

Hope these help! There is a lot in all of these, so if you have follow up questions don't be afraid to post.

Just a reminder of our policy regarding Homework Questions, since this post was reported as such. If we suspect someone is trying to get us to do their homework and they don't say it is HW, we sometimes will remove the post, and certainly will ask them. Likewise if someone says it is HW, but is simply asking us to give them the answer, we will remove it as well.

But, if someone is upfront and honest about the fact they are doing homework, and aren't trying to get their work done for them, but rather looking for good sources, and maybe a slight nudge, we are OK with allowing the post to stand, and leave it to the individual users as to whether or not they want to help. For a longer discussion, this old META covers this topic.

Like others have said it is an incredibly complex history. Obviously any country that ends its colonization period with a war is going to have a lot to cover and a lot of negatives. Do you know what you want to focus on? The reparations France made Haiti pay? Trade embargoes? Contemporary class and language issues? The period of political discord and power grabbing after the revolution?