To Diffuse the Light of Civilization

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis A. Pérez
Keyword(s):  
Free Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Social Scene ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The City

This chapter describes the rapid modernization of Cuba, which resulted from increased production and trade following the Haitian revolution and Spain’s authorization of free trade. Drawing on a variety of sources, the chapter explores the emergence of Havana as one of the world’s most important and active ports of trade, and the economic boom’s consequences for the city and country as a whole. From technological advancements, including the telephone, gas street lights, and steam powered machinery, to cultural enrichments of literary, artistic, and social dimensions, Cuba entered modernity well of ahead of its colonial overseers in Spain. The chapter comes alive with first-hand accounts of Havana’s thronging port, bustling streets, and thriving social scene.

Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 1031-1060 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha S. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
The Bahamas ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The North ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Male Companion ◽  
The City

The widow Drouillard de Volunbrun and her household boarded the brig Mary & Elizabeth in November 1796, only after many failed attempts to leave the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Like many others, they sought refuge from the violence and deprivation of the Haitian Revolution. In the party were the widow, her mother, a male companion, Marie Alphonse Cléry and, at best count, twenty enslaved people. Catastrophe struck November 18 when the Mary & Elizabeth wrecked on the west end of the Miguana Reef, off the Bahamas. The vessel and cargo were “totally” lost, but the captain, crew, and twenty-nine passengers, including the Volunbrun household, were “saved.” By the following April of 1797, the household was again at sea, bound for New York City. New York was, Shane White explains, “the center of the heaviest slaveholding region” in the North. Slaveholdings were small, with slaves a shrinking minority of the overall population. Still, one in five households held at least one slave. The household maintained a modest profile during their first four years in the city, moving to what was then the city's northeast periphery, Eagle Street near Bowery. Their neighbors were skilled workers, including butchers, masons, and men working the maritime trades. The widow put most of those she termed slaves to work manufacturing cigars.

Global Race War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander D. Barder
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Independent States ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Global Imaginary ◽  
Race War

Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy explores the historical connections between race and violence from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Barder shows how beginning with the Haitian Revolution and nineteenth century settler colonialism the development of the very idea of global order was based on racial hierarchy. The intensification of racial violence happened when the global racial hierarchy appeared to be in crisis. By the first half of the twentieth century, ideas about race war come to fuse themselves with state genocidal projects to eliminate internal and external enemy races. Global processes of racialization did not end with the Second World War and with the discrediting of scientific racism, the decolonization of the global South and the expansion of the state-system to newly independent states; rather it continued in different forms as the racialization of cultural or civilizational attributes that then resulted in further racial violence. From fears about the “Yellow Peril,” the “Clash of Civilization,” or, more recently, the “Great Replacement,” the global imaginary is constituted by ideas about racial difference. Examining global politics in terms of race and racial violence reveals a different spatial topology across domestic and global politics. Global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities. The book revisits two centuries of international history to show the important consequences of a global racial imaginary that continues to reverberate across time and space.

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