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Books on Haiti and the
Caribbean
David P. Geggus, ed.
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.
University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
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)
Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman.
Open
Gate An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry
(2001)
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The
Impact of the Haitian Revolution
Reviewed by Mimi Sheller
As the 2004 bicentennial of the Republic of
Haiti's independence approaches, with numerous commemorative
events planned throughout the world, the question of the impact
of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world is a very timely
one. This collection of well-researched, historical essays
(based on a conference held in 1998 at the College of
Charleston) is an important assessment of the revolution's
multifarious impacts, and should be consulted by anyone
interested in the bicentennial.
Editor David Geggus has already published a
number of significant contributions to this field, and here he
offers a summative preface and epilogue weighing both the
"positive" and "negative" influences of the
revolution. As in his previous work, he tempers some of
the more "romantically sweeping" assessments of the
revolution's import and seeks instead "to suggest its
limits as well as strengths" (p. 247). In this sense,
it will be a controversial book insofar as it undermines certain
contemporary political projects based on the symbolic import of
the first successful slave revolution.
One of the most valuable contributions of
this collection is to map very clearly the full array of ways in
which the revolution may have had an impact. What
influence did the revolution have on abolitionism in different
countries? What were its economic consequences for other
plantation societies? How did it affect the balance of
military power and diplomacy amongst the great powers?
What were its influences on slave emancipation, racial
equality, and decolonization? Did it foster slave plots
and rebellions? And how did the Saint Domingue refugees
(both free and enslaved), scattered around the circum-Caribbean
region, affect the places in which they settled?
The first section provides a punchy
overview of some of the diverse, ambiguous, contradictory, and,
at times, surprising repercussions of the revolution from
distinguished historians David B. Davis, Seymour Drescher, and
Robin Blackburn. Davis points out some of the ambiguous
ways in which the revolution may have both hastened and delayed
the abolition of the slave trade and slavery elsewhere; yet his
emphasis is on its positive symbolic role for African Americans
like Frederick Douglass.
Drescher focuses on "The Limits of
Example," questioning the timing and direction of some of
the causal sequences. He argues that some trends
attributed to the impact of the revolution were already
occurring prior to it (such as curtailment of the slave trade in
the United States), while others were only short-lived and were
quickly reversed (such as slave emancipation). Focusing on
British policy, in particular, he bullishly asks, "Was the
Haitian tail really wagging the British Lion?" And he
memorably argues that as a catalyst for other slave
mobilizations, "Haiti was both unforgettable and
unrepeatable" (p. 13).
Blackburn, in contrast, suggests that Haiti
was a significant force of revolutionary example, especially
insofar as the Haitian and French revolutions each radicalized
the other. Most importantly, though, he suggests that by
remobilizing slave regimes where slaveholders were strongest,
and precipitating the end of slavery where slave regimes were
weakest, the "impact of the Haitian Revolution hastened and
accentuated a process of differentiation within the Atlantic
world, dividing it more neatly into slave and non-slave
zones" (p. 19).
The second section considers the
revolution's impact on white political actors in Germany,
Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the United States (it is oddly
entitled "Politics," given that all of the sections
deal with politics of some kind). In an unusual
contribution, Karin Schuller traces the ways in which German
interpretations of the Haitian revolution served as a mirror of
Germany's own internal politics and suggest a shift from
liberalism to racism. Elsewhere reactions of the
slave-owning class to the unfolding events in Saint Domingue
seem to have included "a mixture of paranoia, complacency,
and prudent calculation" (p. xi).
Olwyn Blouet shows how Jamaican planter
Bryan Edwards elaborated a white West Indian counter-ideology to
metropolitan abolitionism; he attacked abolitionists for
instigating slave rebellions, and promoted amelioration of
slavery as a gradual and more practical way forward. Juan
Gonzalez Mendoza suggests some of the complex ways in which the
Haitian Revolution presented Cuban and Puerto Rican
"patricians" with a choice between continuing an
intensive plantation economy based on slavery or diversifying
the economy with a free labor force. The choice of the
former path left both colonies saddled with the specter of
"racial war" and slave conspiracies, which stifled
moves towards independence.
Simon Newman explores how the Jeffersonian
Republicans in the United States bridled their own revolutionary
idealism in the face of truly radical social and racial
revolutions. A "sort of Thermidorian reaction"
(p. 78) occurred, in which Republicans maintained their
revolutionary ideology and rhetoric while "draining it of
its radical essence" (p. 83).
Each of these chapters, then, illustrates
the consolidation of slavery and conservative ideologies amongst
white political actors in the wake of the Haitian revolution.
But what about the alternative influence of the revolution on
anti-slavery ideologies and non-white political actors?
The third section explores the ways
in which the revolution did or did not foment slave resistance
and revolt elsewhere. On the one hand, there is evidence
of a positive causal link, either through transplanted
"French" slaves from Haiti, who were involved in
numerous rebellions and conspiracies, or through the indirect
invocation of the Haitian example (or purported direct aid from
Haiti) by slave rebels and conspirators elsewhere.
On the other hand, the influence of the
revolution has in some cases been exaggerated; it also played a
role in entrenching slavery in some places or extending it into
new places.
Robert Alderson explores a rumored slave
revolt in Charleston in 1793, exploring its possible origins,
aims, and implications, whether as a false rumor or an actual
conspiracy; in either case it reveals a current of black
republicanism within the United States. Laurent Dubois uncovers
significant evidence of Haiti's influence on insurgencies in
Guadeloupe during the revolutionary regime of 1794-1802.
Matt Childs finds even more striking evidence of Jose Antonio
Aponte's Haitian inspiration in the 1812 conspiracy in Havana,
Cuba.
Bringing to light a less well-known
example, Aline Helg suggests similar emulation of Haiti amongst
francophone slaves in Cartagena, but shows how political
conditions on the Caribbean coast of New Grenada made revolution
impossible. And Marixa Lasso, finally, explores some of
the ongoing symbolism of the Haitian revolution amongst lower
classes in the Republic of Cartagena. Each of these
chapters points toward significant influences of the revolution
on radicalizing black political actors around the Atlantic
world, even if the full extent of such influences is not fully
known.
The final section of the book examines the
impact of Saint-Domingan refugees (of all colors) in
Philadelphia, Louisiana, and South Carolina. While it has
previously been recognized that the skills and capital of Saint-Domingan
refugees (including slaves) stimulated plantation production
elsewhere in the Americas, the chapters here broach more subtle
questions. Susan Branson and Leslie Patrick consider the
difficult position of black and "colored" migrants
within Philadelphian society, including their distinction from
the local black community.
Paul Lachance provides ample evidence of
the ways in which the numerically significant Saint-Domingan
migration into Louisiana altered the population structure and
entrenched a tri-partite pattern of racial distinctions,
atypical in the rest of the United States. And Geggus's
chapter on the Caradeux family of South Carolina explores the
differing memories of this refugee family amongst its white and
black descendants, and contrasts these oral histories with the
historiographic evidence. This section, thus, offers an
interesting reflection on some of the more indirect and
long-term impacts of the revolution.
In the epilogue, Geggus sketches a
"balance sheet" of the Haitian revolution's impacts,
trying to distinguish between its symbolic import and the
substantive difference it "really" made (p. 247),
dimensions that some readers might find harder to disentangle.
It is a sobering tally and it sets a challenge for those who
would claim more positive impacts of the revolution to provide
the historical evidence. Geggus suggests, for example,
that the frequent rumors of emancipation that sparked slave
rebellions were more often linked to metropolitan abolitionism
than to Haiti's example, and, moreover, that slave resistance
did not necessarily contribute to the progress of slave
emancipation.
He also finds the Haitian revolution's
impact on ideas about racial difference and the reform of race
relations to be "profoundly ambiguous" (p. 248).
The Haitian revolution's "contribution to stimulating
political activism among free people of color in the nineteenth
century" (p. 249) is one of the most promising lines of
inquiry, but further research is needed. Its impact on the
French revolution, on the military balance between the great
powers, on the expansion of plantation economies, on the
cultural landscape of the Greater Caribbean, and on processes of
decolonization are all downgraded or downplayed.
In sum, this book is an extremely valuable and timely
contribution to the literature on the Haitian revolution,
framing key questions and setting an agenda for future research.
Yet it steals the thunder of writers like C. L. R. James
and Eugene Genovese, and in some ways seems to diminish the
power of the Haitian revolution. If these tendencies are unwelcome
in some circles in this bicentennial year, they can nonetheless
contribute to ongoing debates concerning the relation of Haiti
to the wider Caribbean world today. Who "owns"
the Haitian revolution, and in what ways? Are the meanings
(and continuing "real" impacts) of the slave
revolution as contradictory and ambiguous today as they were in
the past?
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Mimi Sheller
m.sheller@lancaster.ac.uk
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University * * *
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* * updated 4 October 2007 |
