Was Haiti the richest society in the world in the late 18th century? Samuel Bowles writes:


  At the close of the eighteenth century ... Haiti was probably the richest society in the world.


Is the above claim true?
It has certainly been argued in various places that Haiti was the "richest" colony.  It's obviously difficult to reconstruct modern measures of wealth such as per capita income for historical territories, and the metric of "rich" that mattered in the day was how much revenue could be extracted by the colonial government, so assessments may be skewed towards this.  My books are boxed at the moment, but this is what I could find based on the footnotes from Understanding Power (ch 10 p62).

Citing Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971, pp. 19-20:


  At the time of the French Revolution, Saint Domingue [Haiti] was the
  wealthiest European colonial possession in the Americas. As early as
  1742 the sugar production of Saint Domingue exceeded that of all the
  British West Indies, and on the eve of the revolution the colony
  accounted for more than one-third of the foreign commerce of France.
  In 1789 French trade with Saint Domingue amounted to £11 million,
  while the whole of England's colonial trade totaled only £5 million.
  In the same year the ports of Saint Domingue received 1,587 ships, a
  greater number than Marseilles, and France employed 750 ships
  exclusively for the Saint Domingue trade. The chief exports of the
  colony were sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, molasses, and dyewoods. The
  French built an elaborate network of roads, irrigation systems, and
  magnificent plantations.


Citing Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1994, p. 63:


  At one time or another, the colony was first in world production of
  coffee, rum, cotton, and indigo. On the eve of the American
  Revolution, Saint-Domingue [Haiti] -- roughly the size of the modern
  state of Maryland -- generated more revenue than all thirteen North
  American colonies combined. By 1789, the colony supplied three-fourths
  of the world's sugar. Saint Domingue was, in fact, the world's richest
  colony and the busiest trade center in the New World.


And citing Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: the Breached Citadel, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990, pp. xviii:


  In the second half of the eighteenth century... [Haiti] created more
  wealth than any other colony in the world. At that time, 50 percent of
  France's transatlantic commerce involved Haiti, and nearly 20 percent
  of the French population depended on trade with Haiti for its
  livelihood... Overall investments in the Haitian economic
  infrastructure were meager compared to the enormous profits and trade
  advantage gained by France. Economically, Saint-Domingue [Haiti] was
  the world's most profitable colony. It soon became known as "the pearl
  of the Antilles" and was the standard by which the profitability of
  other colonies was judged.