An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom: Revolution, Emancipation, and Reenslavement in Hispaniola, 1789 – 1809 by Graham T. Nessler (review)

Graham T. Nessler's main question that guides his research of emancipation and re-enslavement in Santo Domingo during the Haitian Revolution is how did the Haitian Revolution transform notions of enslavement and emancipation in Santo Domingo? Nessler argues that the Haitian Revolution created new political and legal concepts of freedom because of the intersection of Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo's "histories of resistance to slavery and racial oppression" (16). Saint-Domingue's plantation economy served as an example for Spanish reforms, officials, and planters' attempts at making Santo Domingo more profitable. Nonetheless, Santo Domingo's tradition of marronage, the presence of a rural peasantry, and the legal code of slavery supporting a tradition of manumission offered an alternative possibility for enslaved workers in Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. Santo Domingo's economic relationship with Saint-Domingue through foodstuffs and with the larger Caribbean further warranted a closer look at a colony marginalized by the Spanish during the eighteenth century.

Nessler situates his study on Santo Domingo within the larger existing historiography on the Haitian Revolution. Modern English scholarship on the Haitian Revolution beginning with C.L.R. James examines the Haitian Revolution and its impact on slavery and institutionalized racism that gave rise to new forms of resistance, while also capturing the paradox of how the Haitian Revolution brought about new forms of coercion for labor and the entrenching of slavery in other places. Nessler's work moves the debate further by focusing on Santo Domingo's contribution to these struggles and discussions in the Atlantic world. Santo Domingo's geographic proximity to Saint-Domingue did not mean that the fighting and ideas of the Revolution went forward, but that the Spanish island's own historical context of slavery, resistance, and colonial rule made it important as they coalesced with Saint-Domingue and slave insurrection. This work's relevance to the Haitian Revolution presents the event as a trans-imperial, inter-colonial, and island-wide affair. It presents the Haitian Revolution as an Atlantic affair. The struggles for freedom in both Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo were in dialogue with one another.

Nessler uses archival research mainly from France and Spain to make his case for Santo Domingo's role in changing understandings of freedom and enslavement during the Haitian Revolution. Many of the documents such as political correspondences, proclamations, military reports, and memoirs figured prominently in other studies on the Haitian Revolution and free people of color. Yet, Nessler brings a new eye to these documents, particularly the decrees and proclamations of the black auxiliary officers Georges Biassou, Toussiant Louverture, and Jean-François Papillon that forced the hand of French republican official Léger-Félicité Sonthonax to issuing the famed emancipation decree of 1793. Still, Nessler's monograph also includes notarial records from Santo Domingo's time under French rule that contain newly emancipated enslaved peoples' attempts at documenting their freedom in lieu of France's new commitment to slavery. Scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis and Kathryn Burns inform Nessler's reading of these sources to focus on historical actors contested freedom and its meaning in Santo Domingo.

Some significant findings of An Islandwide Struggle include that the emancipation decree of Sonthonax in 1793 was in response to a larger discursive struggle and appeal of ex-slaves embracing elements of royalist ideology and the preservation of freedom. The French attempt to placate the remaining Spanish officials and inhabitants in Santo Domingo after the French occupation hindered the implementation of emancipation laws in the former Spanish colony. Toussaint's vision and plan for a unified Hispaniola clashed with metropolitan France's vision under Napoleon of two separate regimes with different sets of laws. Toussaint's reforms to bring Santo Domingo with a plantation economy puts him in a...