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Books on Haiti and the
Caribbean
Hubert Cole. Christophe: King of Haiti. New
York: The Viking Press, 1967.
C.L.R. James.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(1938)
Edourad Gissant.
Caribbean Doscourse (2004)
/ Barbara Harlow.
Resistance Literature (1987)
Josaphat B. Kubayanda.
The Poet's Africa: Africanness in the Poetry of Nicolas Guillen and Aime
Cesaire
(1990)
Myriam J. A.
Chancy.
Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997)
Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman.
Open
Gate An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry
(2001)
David P. Geggus, ed.
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.
University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
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Haitians Demand Reparations
for the Ransom Paid
for its Independence
The
people of Haiti gained their independence in 1804 following
several years of a persistent and bloody struggle against the
brutal French colonialists. The colonial powers of the time,
notably the United States and France, refused to recognize the
legitimate independence of this small island nation. The United
States, perhaps the most notorious of the slave owning
countries, believed that recognizing Haiti's independence would
threaten the stability of its own inhumane system of slave
labor.
In
1825 France demanded that Haiti pay the French government 150
million gold francs to "compensate" French plantation
slave-owners for their "financial losses" and in
exchange for France's recognition of Haiti's independence. Years
later, the amount was reduced to 90 million gold francs. The
Haitian elite who had gained control of the country following
independence, caved in to the pressure, seeing this ransom as an
inevitable and necessary financial obligation if the country
were to be allowed to live in peace and freedom and resume trade
with its former colonizers. It took Haiti close to 100 years to
pay off this debt and the debt was paid, not out of the money
made by the elite through the export of raw goods, but rather on
the backs of the Haitian people who continued to work the land.
All the public schools in Haiti were closed in order to make the
first payment, the first example of the imposition of a
structural adjustment program.
Today,
the people of Haiti have joined with their democratically
elected government to demand that France restitute to the
Haitian people this "debt" money - 21.7 billion
dollars in today's currency. On behalf of the people of Haiti,
President Jean Bertrand Artistide has made an official request
to France, which has formally recognized slavery to be a crime
against humanity; French legislators have verbally recognized
the legitimacy Haiti's request for restitution. Although several
international lawyers are working on the case for restitution,
the hope is that France will act according to its stated
principle and pay its debt to the Haitian people without the
recourse of international law. Unfortunately, in an echo of the
ugly "1825" past, the French government has reacted to
this just request by placing Haiti on a list of
"undesirable" countries not to be visited; this
vindictive and unjustifiable response is being protested by
people of conscience, particularly in France and Haiti.
As
Haiti starts the celebration of its bicentennial, we are asking
you to support the Haitian people in their claim for
restitution. France's payment of this debt will give the people
of Haiti the financial resources needed to finally reverse the
legacy of neo-colonial exploitation, oppression and structural
underdevelopment that has caused their country to be labeled the
"poorest in the western hemisphere". Restitution will
pave the road toward true economic rebuilding, independence and
improved living conditions, and will send a clear message that
the financial and human damages inflicted by the colonial powers
must be rectified, not just in Haiti, but throughout the world.
For more information about
Haiti or to learn what you can do to support Haiti, call the Haiti
Action Committee at (510) 483-7481, write them at HAC, P.O. Box 2218, Berkeley CA 94702 or visit their website at
http://www.haitiaction.org
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The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
Reviewed by Mimi Sheller
The slave
revolution that two hundred years ago created the
state of Haiti alarmed and excited public opinion on
both sides of the Atlantic. Its repercussions ranged
from the world commodity markets to the imagination
of poets, from the council chambers of the great
powers to slave quarters in Virginia and Brazil and
most points in between. Sharing attention with such
tumultuous events as the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic War, Haiti's fifteen-year struggle for
racial equality, slave emancipation, and colonial
independence challenged notions about racial
hierarchy that were gaining legitimacy in an
Atlantic world dominated by Europeans and the slave
trade. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the
Atlantic World explores the multifarious
influence—from economic to ideological to
psychological—that a revolt on a small Caribbean
island had on the continents surrounding it. |
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Fifteen international
scholars, including eminent historians David Brion Davis,
Seymour Drescher, and Robin Blackburn, explicate such diverse
ramifications as the spawning of slave resistance and the
stimulation of slavery's expansion, the opening of economic
frontiers, and the formation of black and white diasporas.
Seeking to disentangle the effects of the Haitian Revolutionfrom
those of the French Revolution, they demonstrate that its impact
was ambiguous, complex, and contradictory.—Publisher,
University of South
Carolina Press
David P. Geggus is a
professor of history at the University of Florida in Gainesville
and a former Guggenheim and National Humanities Center fellow.
He has published extensively on the history of slavery and the
Caribbean, with a particular focus on the Haitian Revolution. He
is the author of
Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint
Domingue, 1793–1798 and an editor of
A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater
Caribbean. Geggus lives in Gainesville.
Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804
A Brief History with Documents
By Laurent
Dubois and John D. Garrigus
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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update 6 May 2010
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