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Slavery, Revolution, Independence: Saint-Domingue and Haiti, 1685-1838

Module description

This module offers the opportunity to study the emergence of the independent nation-state of Haiti out of a violent revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue during the 1790s. This unique and troubling national story begins in the sugar, coffee and indigo plantations that spread across this Caribbean island during the eighteenth-century, an economy of unrivalled human exploitation which contained half a million slaves by 1789. The module explores this colonial society in its global setting before analysing its destruction, triggered by a massive slave rebellion from 1791, and the early years of the nation created by people of colour to replace it: Haiti. No prior knowledge or French language skills are required on this module.

Module aims - intentions of the module

In this module you will develop an understanding of the structures of power underpinning the colonial society and plantation economy of Saint-Domingue – as well as the domestic and international tensions these structures produced. You will be asked to interrogate the critical role that race and Enlightenment-era ideas regarding racial difference played out across the century after France first attempted to regulate the rights and treatment of both slaves and free people of colour in 1685. The module will then allow you to consider the extent to which the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, and the early years of Haitian independence, were able to dismantle these structures. Or, was exploitation, violence and discrimination perpetuated and given new direction? International perspectives will also feature, with opportunities to consider the relationship with the American colonies/United States, and the British and Spanish Empire in the Caribbean. Most significantly, we will interrogate the influence of the French metropole on its prized colonial asset’s journey towards nationhood. France underwent its own dramatic changes during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras (1789-1815) and only fully recognised Haitian independence, reluctantly, in 1838.

The module’s timeframe will require you to consider these themes from both long- and short-term perspectives, and throughout you will be asked to reflect on key historiographical debates. Through secondary reading, primary-source analysis and other learning activities, the module will also foster transferable skills in research, analysis, and written and oral communication.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the main themes across this module, together with a very close knowledge of the areas selected for essay and presentation work
• 2. Track and analyse the competing historical dynamics at play across the module’s timeframe and geographies, as well as the changing nature of the related historiography

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Analyse the key developments in a defined historical subject
• 4. Handle profoundly different approaches to history, in a subject area that has strong contemporary resonances and legacies
• 5. Ability to understand and deploy complex historical terminology correctly

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 6. Carry out independent study and group work, including the presentation of material for group discussion, developed through the mode of learning
• 7. Ability to digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument, developed through each mode of assessment
• 8. Ability to present arguments orally, and to work successfully in a group

Syllabus plan

Lecture topics may include:

• Metropolitan authority in the colonies: the Code noir of 1685 and its eighteenth-century legacy
• The slave trade, slavery, and the plantation economy
• Race and citizenship during the Enlightenment
• The status and roles of free people of colour within slave society
• The French Revolution’s impact on Saint-Domingue
• The French Empire and the abolition of slavery
• The slave rebellion of 1791
• Toussaint Louverture and the making of a Haitian Revolution
• International reaction to the Haitian Revolution, 1790s-1830s: the Caribbean and North/South America
• The fight for independence, 1801-1804
• Napoleon’s imperial ambitions in the Caribbean
• Independence at the cost of dictatorship? Haiti’s post-emancipation politics, from Dessalines to Boyer (1804-1838…and beyond)

Seminar topics may include:

• Manumission: the politics and culture of freeing slaves in ancien regime Saint-Domingue
• The Makandal conspiracy: a case study in slave resistance
• Sonthonax, Polverel and France’s reluctant abolition of slavery
• Structures of violence within Saint-Domingue and during the Haitian Revolution
• International ambiguities on emancipation: Haiti’s struggle for international recognition post-1804
• Slave cultures: religion and identity
• Colonial authority and disunity in the revolutionary era
• Factionalism and history in contemporary accounts of the Haitian Revolution
• Race and gender in colonial and revolutionary settings

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Basic reading [all available online via the University library]:

• Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2005)
• Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution(2012)
• Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: the Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (1990)
• Trevor G. Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (2016)

More specialized readings for particular seminars [all except White available online via the University library]:

• Jean Casimir, The Haitians: A Decolonial History, trans. by Laurent Dubois (2020)
• Crystal N. Eddins, Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution: Collective Action in the African Diaspora (2022)
• Faherty, Duncan, The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters (2023)
• Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (2012)
• David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (2002)
• Judith Kafka, ‘Action, Reaction, and Interaction: Slave Women in Resistance in the South of Saint-Domingue, 1793-1794’, Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997): 48-72
• Karol K. Weaver, ‘ “She Crushed The Child’s Fragile Skull”: Disease, Infanticide, and Enslaved Women in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue’, French Colonial History, Vol. 5 (2004), pp. 93-109
• Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (2010)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• In Our Time podcast on the Haitian Revolution: https: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04lsqgs
• A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Crisis of 1789: https://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu/
• GALLICA: the digital collection of France’s national library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France [French language, but also contains images]: http://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/?mode=desktop
• ‘The Louverture Project’: http://thelouvertureproject.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
• ‘Exploring the French Revolution’ website [contains sections on the Haitian Revolution]: http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/

Indicative learning resources - Other resources

• Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus eds., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents (2006)
• David Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (2014)Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean
• M. Jackson and J. Bacon eds., African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents (2009)
• Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (2007)