  Against this background, in the first chapter of the thesis Cooper details the prosperity of the French colonies, especially Santo Domingo, on the eve of the Revolution (“The Social Conditions of the French-American Colonies; the Class Structure”). She describes the various classes including the “petite blancs” (lower middle class whites), “mulatto class” (sometimes rather well educated and extremely desirous of affirming their equality with whites), “colored men” (a term used by the petit blancs that included both those with a mixture of the white race and the black race, as well as the pure Negro natives of Africa or the colonies), and “freed men” (who were generally poor and who were almost as jealous of the mulattos as of the whites), (SFHR, 44–45). 