The world of colonialism, slavery, and race in the 18th and 19th centuries can be almost monolithic in popular U.S. understandings. Whites of European descent enslaved black Africans, who were then put to work on plantations that profited whites and the imperial powers who sent them. When emancipation was discussed, it was an ideal of a fringe group of white abolitionists, who despite their modern ideas were too few to effect change in many places. Beginning with the abolition of the English slave trade in 1807 and ending with the emancipation of U.S. slaves in 1863, Africans were finally granted freedom by people of European descent.
The Haitian Revolution explodes every one of these assumptions. Starting with the first successful slave revolt in 1791 and concluding with the creation of the first independent black ''republic'' in 1804, this revolution featured former slaves and descendents of slaves wresting power from Europeans on their own. It is a natural choice for studying the agency of marginalized people, which has become a kind of Holy Grail for historians in recent years.
Highlighting the agency of the Haitian revolutionaries does not require a particularly flexible imagination, however, as Laurent Dubois demonstrates in his Avengers of the New World. Dubois' work not only retells the story of the Haitian Revolution, it also argues for the Revolution's central place in the history of slavery's destruction and democracy's rise. ''If we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in Saint-Domingue who insisted that human rights were theirs too.'' In contrast to past historians of the Revolution, Dubois emphasizes the agency of the insurrectionists by reading ''against the grain'' of texts authored mostly by whites: throughout the book he suggests interpretations of events that attribute wisdom and logic to participants of African descent. Dubois also takes an explicitly transnational approach to the story, showing the interrelationships of Haiti, France, African kingdoms, Caribbean colonies, and other European nations. And although he does not omit the role of violence in the Revolution, he points out that it was used by all sides in the conflicts that composed it.
Aside from these differences in emphasis, Dubois' project seems to be straightforward: tell the story. Although the Revolution has enjoyed considerable attention within Haiti, it has not been emphasized in broader Atlantic or American histories. Dubois seems to be aiming primarily for this broader audience, in hopes of writing Haiti's story into the popular understanding of slavery and freedom in the Americas. He is well-equipped for this task: his prose is measured and finely-tuned, and he successfully weaves older accounts of the Revolution with newer research to create a narrative that is comprehensive but not unwieldy.
His account raises some questions that suggest further exploration, however. He notes, for example, that while many slaves destroyed the plantations and all the accompanying machinery, others took over the plantation to run it for themselves. Was the destruction of plantation paraphernalia a symbolic act, and did most slaves grasp the economic power the plantations represented? Those slaves who wanted to set up on their own by cultivating gardens: what were their reasons? Even if their motivations prove impossible to discern, what patterns of settlement ensued? Perhaps Dubois tells us all there is to know when he describes former slaves cultivating small plots for their families and local markets, but the possibility of more information about this expression of “independence and subsistence” is tantalizing, as is the suggestion of a Haitian agrarian yeomanry that was crushed by Toussaint Louverture’s policies.
I am reminded of an old Stephen Hahn article about land-usage laws promulgated in the wake of Reconstruction, by which plantation-owners restricted black freedom and preserved for themselves a dependent workforce. Hahn claims that whites were partially motivated by a desire to prevent what had happened in the Caribbean societies: “the success of ex-slaves in taking up former provision grounds that proved unsuited to staple crops.” It seems to me that a profitable transnational comparison could be in order.
Notes
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.
Ibid., 230, 239-240.
Stephen Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South” (Radical History Review 26, 1982), 44.
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