Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915, by Jack Daniel Webb

Abstract

Reviewed by: Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847–1915 by Jack Daniel Webb Tim Watson (bio) Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847–1915, by Jack Daniel Webb; pp. xii + 270. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020, £95.00, $130.00. Haiti and Britain have a long, complex, and significant entanglement, but scholarship on those connections has been scarce. Haiti has been silenced in the European and North American imagination, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). In the British context, that silencing has been ongoing for more than two hundred years, since Britain’s disastrous 1790s invasion of the territory that would become independent Haiti. The combination of Black rebel armies and yellow fever utterly defeated the British army, killing more than 10,000 men. This inglorious imperial episode was actively forgotten in the years that followed. It haunted the British imagination nevertheless: for example, in the “meagre,” “ghastly” figure of the discharged soldier in Book 4 of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805), who returns to England from “the Tropic Islands” not as a military hero but as a figure of convalescent abjection (1850 edition, edited by Basil Worsfold, [The De la More Press, 1904], Book 4, lines 395, 398, 424). Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847–1915 is a noteworthy and welcome contribution to recent scholarly efforts to redress this silencing and to accord Haiti its rightful place in anglophone cultural history. Lucidly written and impressively researched, Jack Daniel Webb’s book is structured around flash points when Haitians and Britons interacted at the edges of the formal British empire, analyzing the refraction of those encounters in the British public sphere. Webb convincingly argues, “From the ‘margins’, Haiti repeatedly returned to the forefront of British debates, providing a powerful example of a decolonised alternative to British imperial systems” (5). Although the emphasis is on Britain, as the book’s title suggests, Haitian intellectuals and politicians are significant characters in the book, shaping the ways in which they were represented. Webb spends time on Faustin Soulouque, for example, who declared himself emperor of Haiti in 1849, and on Alonzo Potter Holly, who was educated at Cambridge University and at New York Medical College, becoming a doctor and Haitian consul in the Bahamas (and later becoming a prominent Black community leader in 1920s Miami, although this is beyond the timeline and scope of Webb’s book). [End Page 709] A great strength of the book is the author’s archival research, which shows that while sensationalist, racist British tropes about Haiti were solidifying and repeating throughout the nineteenth century, British agents of empire on the ground in Haiti had to navigate a series of complex, shifting challenges, as Haitians worked to influence inter-imperial relations in the Caribbean. Most strikingly, Webb’s research in Foreign Office diplomatic papers provides a new context for the most notorious of all British accounts of Haiti, Spenser St. John’s Hayti, or the Black Republic (1884). St. John’s book—influential well into the twentieth century—promoted myths of Haitian cannibalism and sorcery, the author capitalizing on his previous posting as British consul in Port-au-Prince to claim eyewitness authority for his primitivist fantasies. Webb reads the diplomatic correspondence between St. John and his London bosses to recast The Black Republic as a retroactive literary revenge on Haitians who refused to recognize white supremacy or to acknowledge the beneficence of British power. For example, St. John had written in outrage to London in 1864 describing a Haitian general who had had the audacity to linger in the gardens of the consulate and to inform the British official “that he should stop on my premises as long as he pleased[,] and on my then requesting him to leave he addressed the most insulting language to myself” (qtd. in Webb 143). Webb’s research shows us the practical difficulties experienced by British agents in managing relations with Haiti and their profound discomfort in encountering Haitian independence in practice. In the fourth chapter, the author analyzes a fascinating set of diplomatic exchanges in the first decade of the twentieth century, as London...