This chapter examines the division of labor and the process of sugar production on the plantations of Saint-Domingue. Plantations like the Ferron de la Ferronnays operation on the Cul de Sac plain had a contradictory set of imperatives: they existed to produce specialized crops for sale on world markets, which precluded the production of subsistence crops; at the same time, they had to hedge against the ever-present possibility that warfare or meteorological crisis would temporarily shutter world markets to them. This fact dictated a less technologically dynamic, more labor-intensive pattern of investment. The eighteenth-century plantation was poised between two forms of organization: it resembled the nineteenth century factory, but in other respects it resembled a much older social form: the latifundia of the ancient world, which were organized around the need for self-sufficiency and stability that the plantations of the Antilles rarely achieved.