Fragments of Sovereignty: Haiti in the Atlantic World

More than any other group of scholars in the past sixty years, historians of Haiti have changed how we think about the Atlantic age of revolution. Black Atlantic studies, which has made slavery and diaspora indispensable to understanding the revolutionary era, finds one of its origin points in C. L. R. James’s history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. More recently, scholars of Haiti have offered the fiercest and most effective challenge to R. R. Palmer’s much-used, much-critiqued “age of the democratic revolution” paradigm. Having begun by questioning specific claims— such as how the era’s democratic promises squared with entrenched racial divides—some have moved since the bicentennial of Haitian independence in the direction of a full-scale reworking of the paradigm that puts Saint Domingue/Haiti at its center.¹

The publication of Julia Gaffield’s Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World alongside Ronald Angelo Johnson’s Diplomacy in Black and White marks an important step in the development of Haitian history within the wider age of revolution historiography. Both books are histories of Haitian foreign relations in the years just before and after the new nation’s 1804 declaration of independence from France. Johnson’s subject is the “Atlantic world alliance” forged in the late 1790s between U.S. president John Adams and Toussaint Louverture, then governor-general of Saint Domingue. Johnson’s fine-grained study, following a typical periodization in U.S. history, closes with the start of Thomas Jefferson’s presidential term in 1801. Gaffield’s story begins a few years later, in 1804. Her fascinating book, interested in law and politics as much as diplomacy, explores how Haitians struggled to create links with the outside world and gain recognition of their nation’s sovereignty after Louverture’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, claimed independence for his country. Both books help to flesh out the relatively understudied diplomatic history of Haiti’s revolution. They each offer, though in quite different ways, methodological insights that should be valuable for scholars working elsewhere in the Atlantic world during the revolutionary period.

Haitian Connections begins by setting up the paradox that motivates both books: though foreign powers for decades refused to formally recognize its independence and sovereignty, Haiti often functioned as a state on the international stage. In her first chapter, Gaffield demonstrates how deep Haiti’s links with the outside world ran after 1804. In spite of strenuous efforts, France, Haiti’s former colonial power, failed either to quarantine the new nation diplomatically or to isolate it from international trade. In a sense, this should not surprise us. European empires were rarely able to suppress illicit commerce so long as it remained financially rewarding to merchants and mariners. Yet the Haitian Revolution had long seemed to offer a plausible exception to this rule because Euro-American governments were willing to enact repressive measures against black Haitians that they would not have contemplated against white men and women. Gaffield shows that such a process of isolation, even if it was imaginable, never came to fruition.

The core of Gaffield’s book unravels the process by which Haiti gained informal recognition of its independence in spite of the Atlantic powers’ refusal to admit the new nation to the community of states. To recover this history, Gaffield looks past the official contours of diplomacy. She eschews the traditional emphasis that diplomatic historians placed on formal accords and the actions of credentialed diplomats. Hers is a history made largely by merchants and colonial officials, which took place in the spaces “beyond official policies as articulated in the metropolitan centers” (13). In keeping with this nonformalist approach to the study of diplomacy, she sees sovereignty itself...