Abolition, Revolution, and Migration, 1788–1793

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Interracial Relationships ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
Popular Movement ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
And Migration

This chapter analyses the early years of the popular movement to abolish the slave trade and its effects on perceptions of mixed-race Jamaicans in Britain. It documents a number of cases of mixed-race migrants, including the responses of families to their arrival, the education they received in Britain, and their professional lives after leaving school. However, attitudes started turning against these migrants for two reasons. First, abolitionist reformers harangued interracial relationships in the colonies—and thus mixed-race people themselves—for undercutting the growth of both a stable white and black population that could obviate the need for more Africans transported across the Atlantic. Yet, some of the principal pro- and antislavery supporters, including William Wilberforce, were personally connected to the families of mixed-race migrants. Second, the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 led many observers to believe that French-educated colonists of color had inspired the uprising, making the prospect of Jamaican students in England a much more politically threatening one.

Open the gate

2021 ◽  
pp. 61-74
Keyword(s):  
Early Period ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Military Assistance ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
French Government ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Masses

This chapter opens with Sonthonax’s decree of 1793 that emancipated the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue. French revolutionary Léger Félicité Sonthonax brought a Civil Commission to Saint-Domingue in 1792 along with 6,000 soldiers. Their mission was to convince white landowners to form a coalition with mulatto landowners in order to crush the rebellion of enslaved people and preserve the colonial system. This delegation was fraught with contradictions as it was a microcosm of the conflict that had engulfed France: the struggle between aristocrats (the king, military leaders and Church leaders, and powerful landowners) and the bourgeoisie (businessmen and factory owners). Saint-Domingue’s social fissures were complex, with six major groups vying for power: the partisans of the new French government; the aristocrats; the freedmen, mixed race and black; the small whites; the leaders of the rebel slaves; and the masses of enslaved people. Trouillot explores the quicksand of shifting alliances and feuding rivalries during this early period of the Haitian Revolution. The white aristocrats refused to ally with the landowning and slave-holding mulatto and black freedmen. The new French government formed a coalition with the freedmen. The small whites resisted and were crushed by the new French government troops. The aristocrats turned to England and Spain for military assistance against the new French government, and these nations invaded and occupied parts of Saint-Domingue. To gain the upper hand, Sonthonax emancipated enslaved people willing to fight with the new French government in June 1793. Days afterward 10,000 French colonists fled the colony by ship. Sonthonax attempted to recruit the leaders of the rebel slaves; however, they were already fighting in the Spanish army and enjoying their freedom—some were even trafficking slaves. By emancipating the enslaved population in August of 1793, Sonthonax lost the support of the slave-owning aristocrats and freedmen, who were the principle power holders, and he was unable to recruit the leaders of the rebel slaves who saw no advantage in collaborating with an army that was losing ground. Having lost control of the traditional alliances, Sonthonax had overcorrected and found himself leaning upon those who had nothing to lose, the enslaved population.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Abolitionist sentiments had long circulated in the British Atlantic world, but it was not until the 1760s in Virginia that they gained political traction in a colony dependent on slave labor. The politics of reproduction explain the success of abolitionism in this time and place: Virginia was unique among Britain’s colonies because, by the mid-eighteenth century, its slave population was growing, and wealthy planters had no need for fresh recruits. The American Revolution depleted the slave populations in the Caribbean, however, because it disrupted both the slave trade and the flow of imported foodstuffs. Consequently, British politicians began to fantasize, by the 1780s, that Caribbean slave societies could mimic the demographic success in North America in order to enjoy the economic benefits of a plentiful labor supply and allow for the abolition of the slave trade. This vision for reform was postponed, however, by geopolitical developments, including the Haitian Revolution.

Missverhältnisse. Nietzsche und die Sklaverei

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Iris Därmann
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Like Hegel, Marx and Engels, Nietzsche has made the Haitian Revolution “unthinkable” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot). He provokes his readers by justifying slavery in the ancient and in the modern world. In order to indicate the problematic dimension of Nietzsche’s cultural legitimation of slavery it is necessary to situate his ideas in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, we need to ask whether his anti-democratic statements regarding the French Revolution could be understood as a “hyper-democratic” commitment to a “coming democracy” (Jacques Derrida) that resists slavery. I raise the question whether Nietzsche, in this context, considers the possibility of overcoming the institution of slavery in modern Europe.

Empires of Property, Properties of Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Brace
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter focuses on the colonists’ claim to property in persons. It looks at the arguments of Kant, Diderot and Cuguano contesting the progressive narrative of civilization and refinement and condemning the ways in which the European spirit of conquest created barbarity and ignorance, and allowed the process of commodification to develop. The chapter explores the contested discourse of improvement and what it meant to be ‘fit for freedom’. The complications of the debates over the abolition of the slave trade in the 1790s show us some of entanglements of the relationship between property, slavery, morality and the law. The unjust and uncertain tenure that owners held in their slaves undermined the stability of their landed property in the metropolitan centre, but also drew attention to the uncertain tenure that slaves held in themselves. The radical antislavery of the Haitian revolution was itself a contest over land and ownership, which at the same time as affirming the enslaved people as agents of change and subjects in their own right, also drew attention to the fuzzy boundaries and unclear content of the categories of slavery and freedom which are the subject of this chapter.

The Sublime Turn Away from Empire: Wordsworth's Encounter with Colonial Slavery, 1802

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Kelly Persyn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Eventual Death ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract "The Sublime Turn Away from Empire" argues that the Haitian Revolution—and Toussaint l'Ouverture's role in it—heavily influenced Wordsworth during his early years and that the1802 sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture epitomizes the poet's development of the "sublime turn." The Wordsworthian sublime, often interpreted in part as a reaction to the violence of the French Revolution, thus appears in this article as a reaction to the frightening and incomprehensible facts of colonial slavery and revolution—the very realities responsible for L'Ouverture's capture, imprisonment, and eventual death in France's Fort de Joux. In this context, the poet formulates his sublime turn as a turn away from the recognition of material slavery and bondage and toward an imaginative freedom nationed specifically English. In pursuing the argument, the article reviews the history of the Haitian Revolution together with the history of Wordsworth's poetic development from 1790 to 1802. In paying special attention to the 1802 sonnets, the article highlights Wordsworth's juxtaposition of French slavery and English liberty and draws on work by Laura Doyle and Alison Hickey to argue that Wordsworth's valorization of nature and nation has the effect of sublimating his own, and his reader's, recognition of empire and race. Ultimately, though Wordsworth speaks of l'Ouverture in a markedly admiring tone, he counsels him to submit to Napoleonic tyranny anyway—while taking comfort in the material sublime. The article explores this paradox and concludes by postulating that such a contradiction is characteristic of Romantic-era attitudes toward race and the sublime.

Port-au-Prince and the Collapse of French Imperial Authority, 1789–1793

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-84
Author(s):  
Jeremy D. Popkin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Colonial Order

Abstract The establishment of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804 was made possible by the collapse of imperial authority early in the French Revolution. Events in the colony's capital, Port-au-Prince, had much to do with that collapse. Between the fall of 1789, when news of the storming of the Bastille reached Saint-Domingue, and the spring of 1793, when French revolutionary authorities recognized that their only hope of maintaining control of the colony was to ally themselves with its black and mixed-race populations against the remaining whites, Port-au-Prince was the most troubled of the island's urban centers and one of the most unstable sites in France's transatlantic empire. Understanding how Port-au-Prince went from a center of colonial authority to a locus of disorder where fatal wounds were inflicted on the colonial order is crucial to any explanation of the background to the Haitian Revolution. L'établissement de la nation indépendante d'Haïti en 1804 fut rendu possible par la faillite de l'autorité impériale pendant les premières années de la Révolution française. Les événements dans la capitale coloniale de Port-au-Prince ont joué un grand rôle en précipitant cette faillite. Entre l'automne de 1789, quand la nouvelle de la prise de la Bastille est arrivée à Saint-Domingue, et le printemps de 1793, quand les autorités révolutionnaires dans la colonie ont reconnu que leur seul espoir de la maintenir sous leur contrôle fut de s'allier avec les populations noires et de couleur contre les blancs, Port-au-Prince fut la ville la plus troublée de Saint-Domingue et l'un des sites les plus perturbés de tout l'Empire français. Une compréhension du processus qui a fait d'un centre d'autorité dans la colonie un foyer de désordre où des coups fatals furent portés contre l'ordre impérial est cruciale pour expliquer le succès de la Révolution haïtienne.

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