A Sharper Focus on the Early Modern Caribbean

As the subdiscipline of Atlantic history has come into vogue in recent decades, historians continue to explore the ideological, economic, and political interconnections created by empire, forced migration, maritime commerce, and emergent print culture in the early modern Atlantic basin. The two recent volumes reviewed here represent the sophistication and growth of the Atlantic history discipline. Nessler’s book on the complex struggles over slavery and freedom in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo during the Haitian Revolution is a fine-grained, focused study of one relatively small society during a twenty-year period. Burnard and Garrigus’ book is a sweeping comparative history of Jamaica and Saint Domingue during the entire second half of the eighteenth century, when the massive importation of African slaves made these the two most profitable sugar colonies of the early modern era. But notwithstanding their different regions and chronological eras of focus, these two texts both explore the complexities of slavery, inter-imperial warfare, and multilateral social conflict in the early modern Caribbean. In addition, the innovative primary research that these three authors bring to the table demonstrates that further study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean history will continue to offer new evidence regarding history’s most explosive struggles over the question of slavery. These two works speak to the relevance of conflicts such as the Jamaican slave uprisings of 1760 and the monumental Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, as well as to broader discussions of race, colonialism, capitalism, and the very concept of Western modernity.

Graham Nessler’s book represents a necessary intervention in the domains of both Haitian and Dominican studies. Nessler was wise enough to identify an important, but long-neglected task within the growing world of Haitian Revolutionary studies. While it was perhaps inevitable that a historian would eventually undertake a thorough study of the many complex effects of the Haitian Revolution in the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, the project was long overdue. With the exceptional events of the Haitian Revolution arguably representing a kind of historic nexus and turning point of what scholars have come to call the early modern Atlantic world, historical studies of Haiti have tended to cluster around the turbulent era of 1791 to 1804. As historians of other regions have increasingly cast their eyes on Haiti, they have extensively explored the transnational dimensions of the Haitian Revolution and the many tendrils that linked this remarkable process with other societies near and far. It is therefore a useful commentary on the state of Dominican Studies to observe that significant scholarly explorations of the influence of the Haitian Revolution on Cuba, Louisiana, Jamaica, Florida, Philadelphia, Venezuela, and the Lesser Antilles all preceded this book, which represents the first major monograph to analyze the complex influences of the Haitian Revolution on neighboring Santo Domingo. Nessler’s book is groundbreaking precisely because the Dominican Republic, although it was the initial nucleus for the European conquest of the New World, remains one of the most poorly understood and scarcely studied societies in the entire hemisphere. Nessler is one of the few scholars to undertake the task of bridging the significant divide between what he recognizes as the “strikingly distinct historiographical traditions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic” (p. 64). This book should remind Dominican historians that, for as long as they cleave to an inward-looking national historiography and avoid the challenges of becoming experts on Haitian history, foreign scholars will continue to have the last word on many aspects of their country’s complex past.

While the Haitian Revolution had effects throughout the Americas, the neighboring colony of Santo Domingo—the original site of black slavery in the Americas—certainly experienced the most direct and significant...