Haitian Revolution
The Haitian Revolution was a successful anti-slavery and anti-colonial insurrection that took place in the French colony of Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804. It resulted in the establishment of Haiti as the first independent black republic in the Americas and the only nation born out of a successful slave revolt. The revolution had a profound impact on the institution of slavery and inspired liberation movements worldwide.
7 Key excerpts on "Haitian Revolution"
eBook - ePub- Jeremy D. Popkin(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...If Haiti today has fallen behind other countries in terms of its ability to provide a good life for its people, we cannot conclude that this is solely a result of the legacy inherited from its revolution. Instead, the reasons for Haiti’s current problems must be sought primarily in more recent historical developments. These include both internal issues – above all, the failure to integrate the poorer classes of the population into society at a time when other countries were moving toward greater democracy – and external ones, notably the role of foreign economic interests and the intervention of foreign governments, particularly the United States, which occupied Haiti militarily from 1915 to 1934 and has intervened directly in the country on several subsequent occasions. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution While the impact of the Haitian Revolution was felt especially in the island itself, the historic events that had taken place there starting in 1791 also affected many other parts of the world. Slavery was such a central institution throughout the Americas that the revolt of 1791 and the declarations of emancipation in 1793 were bound to send shock waves throughout the hemisphere. The Haitians’ victory over the French in 1803 and Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804 challenged the notion that white people, because of their supposedly higher level of civilization, were naturally destined to rule the whole world. Haiti’s success in defending its independence in the years after 1804, despite the many internal and external problems confronting it, made this challenge a continuing issue. It is no accident that the most thorough and eloquent refutation of racist claims about black inferiority to be published in the nineteenth century was the Haitian author Anténor Firmin’s Equality of the Human Races (1885). The Haitian Revolution inspired great hopes among slaves elsewhere and among abolitionists in Britain and the United States...
eBook - ePubHaitian History
New Perspectives
- Alyssa Sepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In that sense, the revolution was indeed at the limits of the thinkable, even in Saint-Domingue, even among the slaves, even among its own leaders. We need to recall that the key tenets of the political philosophy that became explicit in Saint-Domingue/Haiti between 1791 and 1804 were not accepted by world public opinion until after World War II. […] Claims about the fundamental uniqueness of humankind, claims about the ethical irrelevance of racial categories or of geographical situation to matters of governance and, certainly, claims about the right of all peoples to self-determination went against received wisdom in the Atlantic world and beyond. […] By necessity, the Haitian Revolution thought itself out politically and philosophically as it was taking place. […] The Haitian Revolution expressed itself mainly through its deeds, and it is through political practice that it challenged Western philosophy and colonialism. It did produce a few texts whose philosophical import is explicit, from Louverture's declaration of Camp Turel to the Haitian Act of Independence and the Constitution of 1805. But its intellectual and ideological newness appeared most clearly with each and every political threshold crossed, from the mass insurrection (1791) to the crumbling of the colonial apparatus (1793), from general liberty (1794) to the conquest of the state machinery (1797–98), from Louverture's taming of that machinery (1801) to the proclamation of Haitian independence with Dessalines (1804)...
eBook - ePubQuisqueya la Bella
Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective
- Alan Cambeira(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...14 The Haitian Revolution and the Neighbor to the East The storm finally came in the unmasked fury of the triumphant Haitian Revolution. Not to be overlooked, however, is the fact that almost as soon as slavery began in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, turbulent slave revolts and other acts of rebellion served consistently as distant antecedents of the ultimate explosion in the colony. With the powerful Haitian Revolution, the most massive and most successful of slave uprisings history had seen, came an interlinking of the realization of racial equality, the unconditional abolition of slavery, decolonization, and the birth of a nation—the very first in not only the Caribbean, but in all of Latin America. The rallying call not just in Paris, but in faraway Saint-Domingue as well, was Fraternité, Egalité, Liberté. The rapid outbreak and then prolonged succession of bloody warfare in the French colony between 1791 and 1803 was both praised and condemned at the same time by slaves and slave owners respectively throughout the hemisphere. Former slaves had brought about the destruction of the world’s richest colony, had destroyed an otherwise thriving economic system, and eliminated totally the class of individuals who had ruled over this system. Indeed, from the perspective of world history, the Haitian Revolution was certainly unique. This war involved Blacks, mulattos, French, Spanish, and English participants—with the fearless ex-slave Toussaint L’Ouverture emerging as Haiti’s most charismatic hero. The Fall of the Divine Monarchy There is very little doubt in terms of the historical implications, together with closely interwoven sociopolitical factors, that the French Revolution of 1789 served as the spark that most immediately ignited the conflagration in the distant French colony in the Caribbean...
- L. Coppolaro, F. McKenzie, L. Coppolaro, F. McKenzie(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...3 An Explosion of Violence: How the Haitian Revolution Rearranged the Trade Patterns of the Western Hemisphere Steven Topik Historians in recent years have finally begun to give the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 the attention that it deserved as one of the first wars of national liberation and as a momentous blow against Atlantic slavery. 1 That struggle demonstrated that the ideals that so marked the French Revolution, ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’, had very different meanings – and consequences – in an overseas French colony overwhelmingly inhabited by slaves, many of whom were born in Africa. This chapter will consider that world historic event from an unusual perspective by addressing its consequences for international trade in the early nineteenth century. Was the destruction of the Haitian ‘Pearl of the Antilles’ constructive and, if so, who enjoyed the benefits? It will be argued that the colonial bloodbath that severely impacted the most precious European colony in the Caribbean had the ironic effect of diffusing and expanding tropical exports in the Americas – but not in Haiti – and amplifying mass consumption in the United States and Western Europe – but not in the Caribbean. This violent transnational war and social upheaval served as a vehicle for commercial globalization. The historiography of the Haitian Revolution The 13-year-long revolution that broke out in the rich French colony known as Saint Domingue, until recently had been largely ignored or treated as an aberration. 2 It is not even included in R. R. Palmer’s Age of the Democratic Revolution, perhaps because of its ominous social implications and because the rebels were as much inspired by African traditions as by European ones. Latin America’s first independent country and first republic arose from a successful slave revolution – the first in the Americas – that broke out in 1791 in Saint Domingue, later known as Haiti...
eBook - ePub- Micah Alpaugh, Micah Alpaugh(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...11 The Haitian Revolution Not coincidentally, the only successful slave revolt in recorded human history began amidst the French Revolution. The principles of the French Revolution, particularly the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’s assertion that “all men are born and remain equal in rights,” destabilized French colonial politics, creating near-civil war between groups of free men that emboldened the slaves to rise. The French Revolution opened new possibilities for liberation and equality, but the oppressed in the colonies still needed to fight against their French overlords for their own freedom. Elections for the Estates General emboldened Free Men of Color (of African and mixed-race descent, the majority of the free population) to seek political equality with colonial whites. White planters, however, met secretly to elect representatives, while lower-class white mobs harassed and attacked mixed-race assemblies. Free Men of Color in France organized as well—sending their own delegates to France to be seated in the Estates. Particularly after word of the early events of 1789 arrived—followed by heated debates over free-black colonial rights—all were uncertain how their revolutionary parent-state would respond to their claims, opening a power vacuum in the colony even more profound than that in France itself. Concurrently in France, the abolitionist Society of the Friends of the Blacks sought significant colonial changes. Building from recent American and British efforts to end the Atlantic slave trade, the Paris-centered organization founded in 1788 advocated for the end of France’s international trade, while improving life for colonial blacks. Many soon-to-be prominent Jacobin leaders got their first club experience in the abolitionist group...
eBook - ePub- Juan Bosch(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 11 The Haitian Revolution The first stirrings of the French Revolution in 1789 provoked immense agitation in Haiti. The white oligarchy of the colony—known as the grands blancs —hastened to form colonial assemblies and to demand the right to send representatives to the National Assembly that was about to be convened in Paris. The mulatto oligarchy—known as the affranchis — asked that their right to participate in the colonial assemblies be recognized. The grands blancs refused to accept that the affranchis could even vote to elect candidates for these colonial assemblies, so that the French Revolution placed the two groups of the slave-owning oligarchy of Santo Domingo (Haiti) in opposing camps. The mulattoes and free blacks who did not belong to the mulatto oligarchy supported the affranchis, but the French in the colony who were not part of the white oligarchy, known as the petits blancs, opposed the mulatto oligarchy. The slaves, of course, remained on the margin of these struggles, and not willingly, but because neither of the two factions of the oligarchy and their respective partisans took them into account. A reading of the documents of the period leaves the impression that beginning in 1789 in Haiti, feverish political activity was unleashed, but that this did not seriously affect the economic process...
- Kenneth Kalu, Toyin Falola, Kenneth Kalu, Toyin Falola(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Furthermore, Alex Borucki, Eltis and David Wheat point out that “both the first and the last slave voyages to cross the Atlantic disembarked not very far from each other, in the Spanish colonies of Hispaniola (1505) and Cuba (1867).” 4 In the long history of African slavery in the so-called New World, Hispaniola would become the site of one of its most significant events, the Haitian Revolution. In the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which shared the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with the Spanish colony, Santo Domingo, Africans and African-descended peoples successfully overthrew the colonial government in 1804 after more than a decade of ongoing warfare, establishing the second republic in the Americas (after the United States, 1776) and in David Geggus’s words “the world’s first example … of full racial equality in a major slaveowning society.” 5 Although assessment of the impact of the Haitian Revolution has attracted much scholarly attention in recent decades, relatively little attention has been given to its cultural impact. As the essays in Geggus’s 2001 The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World illustrate, the political, economic and social consequences of the revolution have been foremost in researchers’ minds. Moreover, even work that focuses on culture, such as the essays in Doris Garraway’s Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, with its “analysis of literary, historical and political discourses” 6 have tended to focus on the written word. Yet cultures express themselves in many forms. In the Caribbean, music and dance have for centuries communicated culture and identity. Barbara Browning has observed: Because it is nonverbal, dance has often been perceived by Western observers as a relatively insignificant cultural medium, capable of communicating only abstract thought or emotion...
