Julia Gaffield, editor. The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy.

Abstract

In the last couple of decades few fields in the historiography of the Americas have grown so much in quantitative and qualitative terms as that of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In fact, we have passed from a “silenced revolution” to what I would call an “over-interpreted revolution” (including in Susan Buck-Morss’s interpretation of Hegel and what she called “the Haitian connection” in “Hegel and Haiti,” an article that caused an uproar in the academic world when it was published in the year 2000 [Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4: 821–865]). Atlantic history has a lot to do with this increasing interest in the only slave revolution in the history of mankind that has ever succeeded. By itself, this uniqueness should be reason enough to give to the Haitian Revolution a central place in the history of the modern world. At times, however, granting that place seems to imply ignoring the Spanish American Revolutions that began to take place only five years after Haiti declared its independence. This is what Julia Gaffield does in the first page of the preface: “Scholars recognize the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions as part of a broader set of changes occurring across the Atlantic World” (vii). This exclusion is in line with something Gaffield and David Armitage seem to support in their introduction when they affirm that due to the fact that the Haitian Revolution did not share the methods or the aims of the American and French cases, it might therefore “be more productive to see the Haitian Revolution as the first of the Latin American Revolutions” (17). The problem here, of course, is that the Spanish American Revolutions did not share either the methods or the aims of the Haitian Revolution.