#30 The Revolution in Haiti

European Transformation

As the 18th-century global stage was transformed by the turmoil of the period, so too was Europe as a whole.

The Protestant Reformation, the wars that followed, and the slave colonies all provided the initial conditions for Britain to move socially, economically and politically towards a fully operational capitalist society. In 1815, most of Europe remained under the control of kings and the feudal structure that supported European monarchies. All of Europe was still predominantly agricultural. A large part still followed the Roman Church. Colonial and trade expansion, plus the growth of powerful wealthy new classes, formed the conditions for change. Every monarchy in Europe was shaken to the core of its feudal origins by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Only Russia was able to continue her expansion to the east.

The hundreds of German kingdoms which had made up the centre of Europe had all been part of the Holy Roman Empire which had antiquity of 1000 years. This Empire had been the home of the Papacy, the centre of the Catholic Church in all of Europe. The Hapsburg's dynasty had held the title of Emperor since the 15th century. Many early Empires, for instance, the Mogul Empire in India, had had similar structures of relatively small kingdoms with their ancient traditions within a broader and wider kingdom. The smaller German-speaking kingdoms collected taxes, had their own armed forces, and provided the framework of a local authority. The Papacy and the Hapsburg emperor together provided the overall feudal European framework of legitimate authority. Power struggles were common, and the number of German states had declined over the previous centuries from many hundreds to just over 300 by 1800.

The German Confederation in 1815 by TRAJAN 117, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

From 1798 to 1810 there occurred the first attempt to bring the nations of Europe together. It failed and the continent would have to wait another 130 years before Europe attempted to consolidate these competitive nations into a single entity. Although the monarchies of the time attempted to put the clock back, and rebuild their old societies at the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15, it was only a matter of time before the various entities transformed themselves and built up an urban capitalist industrial world.

The national boundaries within Europe set by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 by Alexander Altenhof, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

With the end of the Holy Roman Empire and the removal of the Papal States in Italy, the Pope's power was severely reduced. The three branches of the Christian faith, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant regimes were represented by The Tsar of Russia, the Emperor of Austria and the  King of Prussia.  All three put their signatories together to relieve the Pope of his ascendant power in Europe. In 1861, modern Italy was created, and the Catholic European Pope reduced to his present enclave in Rome.

The impact of this period was profound; it was a watershed series of events. First the American and then the French destroyed monarchical central control and replaced it with ideas of 'liberty'. Then the French wars had spread the revolution over all of Europe.

At the congress of Vienna in 1815, the monarchies attempted to put the clock back. Many of the new reforms remained.

A period of intense internal Turmoil 1750 to 1815

Ideologies were debated, principles altered, and the social, political landscape changed forever.

These were years of turmoil. The aristocracies were attempting to take over land, and peasants were being denied their ancient rights and left destitute. Surplus populations that had been impoverished by new enclosure moved; governments attempted to export people, first to the new American colonies and then to Australia. The new rich had money to bet on the newly found stock exchange. New branches of the Protestant faith spread among the poor. Slaves were beginning to rise. The 13 American colonies rose against the British and the French.

Below I have presented a broad timeline of these years of social and political turmoil:

1718-1775 - 50,000 convicts exported to penal colonies in Virginia, Maryland

1720 - South Sea Bubble. Fortunes lost

1739 - John Wesley, Methodist preacher, spreads new gospel teachings

1747 - Liverpool becomes Britain’s busiest slave port, overtaking Bristol and London. Slave ship owners and Caribbean plantation owners become very wealthy and politically influential

1750 - The Highland Clearances: tenants evicted, emigration to the USA

1760 - Slave rebellion in Jamaica, hundreds executed

1765 - Britain levies stamp duties on US colonies. Riots follow.

1767 - UK levies taxes on imports of tea. Boston tea party to follow in 1773

1761 - First cotton mill; Richard Arkwright in Derbyshire England

1774 - Wesleyans preach against slavery

1775 - US War of Independence against British and French. British defeated at Yorktown Virginia. British fear French or Spanish invasions

1783 - British evacuate British loyalists, 75,000 settlers leave for Canada or West Indies

1787 onwards – British felons shipped to New South Wales and Australia

The Revolution in Haiti

In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo (now Haiti) supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave trade. It was an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony in the world, the pride of France and the envy of every other imperialist nation. The whole structure rested on the labour of half a million slaves.

- C L R James The Black Jacobins preface to the first edition, page xviii

Though the revolution in Haiti, at the time the richest of all the West Indian islands, is still being written about it is far less researched than the French Revolution. The success of CLR James’s famous title The Black Jacobins and Toussaint’s L'Overture and The San Domingo Revolution had immediate consequences throughout the West Indian colonies. Every colonised island was populated with many more enslaved people than Europeans. Most of the slave owners lived in Europe and their plantations were run by managers. The fear of r slave revolutions was palpable. In the 1820s and 30s, uprisings did occur in Jamaica and through the southern American states. They were put down with the utmost cruelty and brutality. Descriptions of hangings, burning alive, castrations etc, would make today’s reader's blood run cold.

Depending on your view, you can rejoice in Toussaint L'Overture’s success or not. France after 1815 did not. Both Napoleon and British forces attempted a new invasion; both failed. France behaved towards Haiti as every European and American government has behaved towards revolutionary governments, with the utmost hostility. France cut off all trade with the new government and persuaded the rest of Europe and the new USA governments to do likewise. After 1815, France imposed a total blockade on Haiti. From being the richest West Indian island, Haiti sunk to the poorest, where she remains to this day.

The Haitian Revolution and the anti-slavery movement led by Britain might have been a watershed movement in the slave trade as a whole. It wasn't, however. Slave owners and West Indian island administrators were certainly terrified of new political risings by slaves. The movement in Britain to be rid of the slave trade needs to be understood in the context of religious movements within Britain itself. Many British historians have emphasised the moral high ground, as British legislation outlawed both the trade in slaves and slavery itself in 1807 and 1833. British slave owners, mainly living in Britain, were compensated out of British taxes. But the demand for slaves in Brazil and the southern US states for cotton farming was inexorable, and the numbers of slaves crossing the Atlantic increased in the first half of the 19th century.

Napoleonic Wars: The first near Global War 1795 to 1815

It is easy to overestimate the changes made by the French Revolutionary Wars, especially because the 1815 Treaty at Vienna attempted to put the old monarchies back in place. The story needs to be one of nuance. The most important issue for us today is to understand that violence and revolution had begun to break the back of the old regimes. The virtues of the old order had been challenged; the way forward was the new sciences and technology. And that meant a new order where the role of the Church would be forever challenged, where secular thought had been let loose.

Over the nineteenth century, the German statelets would coalesce, Prussia would rise to prominence, the Confederation of the Rhine (39 mini-states in 1815) would be the beginning; and over the following 55 years, Germany as we now know it would arise. A new Italy would be formed, and the role of the Catholic Church would be severely diminished. The monarchical government held on tenaciously throughout much of Europe in the 19th century. The Hapsburg Empire, composed of present-day Austria and Hungary, had a capital in Vienna. They were able to suppress further revolutionary attempts in 1848, and there were attempts to create a centralised bureaucratic state, but the whole eventually collapsed in 1918.

MAP

Transformation Violence and Capitalism: the 19th century

There were four ways that Europe was transformed by this turmoil, as has been very briefly summarised below:

Firstly, the structures of the nation-states were sufficiently transformed to provide the conditions for capitalist development.

Secondly, the West Indies ceased to provide the main forms of new wealth created by slavery and the trade in slaves. Britain and then other European nations in the 19th century began to look to Asian colonies and then Africa for new wealth.

Thirdly, for the first time, there was a single dominant global military power: Britain. China had been the worlds richest Nation, but as an old-world empire, was unable to defend herself. By 1918 China had collapsed when confronted with the military might of the new technologically sophisticated, rapacious industrialising capitalism.

“The Territorial Expansion of Russia” by Mzajac, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Britain would spend the 19th century attempting to assert her global dominance. Her colonial focus moved to India, where she fought two wars against the Afghans attempting to limit Russian expansion in the east. She would fight in Crimea on behalf of the Ottomans, for the same purpose: to stop Russian expansion. She fought in China to begin the process of colonising that region. She fought numerous wars in Africa from the 1880s onwards. She built up the most formidable navy to achieve all of this. And at the same time, she built up her financial authority globally, as will be illustrated in the next few blogs

So, the French wars had altered the global game of power across the world.

Fourthly, and finally, the attitudes to labour, slavery and the people began to slowly change. Slavery had been the method of handling the labour needs of colonies for approximately 300 years in all the Europeans’ colonial nations. While slavery began to be widely questioned both in Britain and in the USA, the needs of existing and new plantations still needed cheap or free labour. Equally the new infrastructural developments of roads, railways and inland water transport demanded labour that could not be obtained locally. For example, the railways in the USA or the inland waterways in Britain. Quietly and without publicity, new cheap or free labour was obtained, under the name of indentureship. Indentured labour was obtained on a massive scale from India and China. Between 1820 and 1920 indentured labourers were shipped to plantations and governments in all colonies. In Britain, Irish labourers undercut English or Scottish labourers to build the railways.

Internally within the European colonising nations there was great poverty and want among many of the urban peoples. It would take two more great wars before a semblance of care for the urban working class would be universally created.

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Suggested reading

The Struggle for Global Domination:

The transition to industrial capital has been widely discussed in the literature. An excellent account is contained in Sandra Halpern, Re-envisioning Global Development Routledge 2013. Halpern considers most of the major writers on this subject beginning with Karl Marx, Paul Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, Immanuel Wallerstein, Robert Brenner, Rodney Hilton and Perry Anderson, among many others.

The Haitian Revolution:

The crucial book is C L R James The Black Jacobins, Penguin 1938. This is THE classic on the subject: see page xiv for further readings.

19th-century slave trade:

Stephen Yafa, Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fibre, The Penguin Press 2009.

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 1944, is the classic study of this major subject.

American anti-Bellum plantation slavery:

Sven Bechert, Cotton A New History of Global Capitalism, Penguin 2014.

Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, Slavery and Empire, in the Cotton Kingdom, Harvard University Press 2013.

Cotton, Slavery, Plantations and Capitalism:

John Clegg, Capitalism and Slavery, New York University, an online essay.

Portrait of Général Toussaint Louverture - Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library.

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