A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (review)

This timely volume provides an exhaustive and comprehensive analysis of the complexities of the Revolutionary age and their shaping of various societies in and around the Caribbean Basin. Indeed, it can convincingly be claimed that what these articles highlight overall is the almost symbiotic relationship between events in Europe and corresponding legal, social, and political developments in the Caribbean slave colonies. In particular, these readings show not only that the changes wrought by the French Revolution and its aftermath catalyzed local traditions of resistance in the region—the most explosive of which was obviously the slave revolution of Saint-Domingue in 1791--but that the scope and substance of the European revolution was itself largely informed and shaped by struggles for liberty and racial equality in the colonies.

To drive this often-overlooked point home, many of these pieces strategically re-cite a number of key points; first, that the French, British, and Spanish Caribbean colonies were in 1789 the economic jewels in their respective metropolitan crowns; that France's banning of racial discrimination in 1792 and the abolition of slavery in all French-held territories in 1794 were the direct result of colonial agitation; and that the Haitian Declaration of Independence of 1804 produced the second sovereign nation in the New World. It is thus well-nigh impossible to overstate either the pivotal importance of empire and trade to contemporary colonizing powers, or the extent to which the interconnectedness of these Euro-Caribbean axes drove a strategic combination of mercantilism and cosmopolitanism that reinforced the centrality of the Caribbean for these powers from Havana to Port-of-Spain.

The wide-ranging opening piece by David Geggus gives an exemplary impetus to these themes: the author shows that major currents of war, upheaval, and insurrection disrupted the entrenched patterns of colonialism and slavery in the region following the twin insurrections of 1789 and 1791. While liberty and equality made it clear that "[t]he revolution's threat to Caribbean slavery was both ideological and political" (11), the wide-ranging nature of subsequent regional uprisings, as well as the radical symbolism implicitly inscribed in "[t]he choice of an Amerindian word to celebrate the rupture with Europe," for "Haiti was a symbol of black achievement in a world dominated by Europeans," is highlighted (18). Carolyn Fick, in her turn, emphasizes not only Haiti's groundbreaking inauguration of slave emancipation but its abolition by the National Convention and the attempts by Napoleon Bonaparte and the French bourgeoisie to reintroduce it, reflecting "the inability of the French revolutionaries themselves to confront the issue of slavery head on in the legislative assemblies" (52). Similarly, Michael Duffy demonstrates incontrovertibly that the British West Indian colonies were "easily Britains biggest overseas capital investment," accounting for "about one-fifth of all British foreign trade" (79); in like manner, her Caribbean holdings accounted for two-fifths of France's foreign trade, with Saint-Domingue the most valuable European colony by the 1780s. Clearly, then, to describe the critical importance of Caribbean colonial holdings to the imperial diadem as "now virtually the crown itself" (79), as Duffy does, is no exaggeration.

David Barry Gaspar's piece, "La Guerre des Bois," focuses on St. Lucia's little-noticed Brigands' War, where, following a proclamation of emancipation, the playing out of European rivalries "plunged Saint Lucia into the heat of a military and political conflict which tore the island apart" (124). David Geggus's "Slave Resistance in the Spanish Caribbean" hews a critical middle ground between the two dominant theories—"the transition from an African- to a creole-dominated slave population" (131) versus the influence of the French and Haitian revolutions—in order to ultimately reinforce both the complexity and the permanence of slave rebellion in these territories. Other pieces underscore the crucial interrelation...