'REVOLISYON AYISYEN', THE HAITIAN SLAVES UPRISING

Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Haitian Revolution, the insurrection against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, that started on a day like today in 1791.

The Haitian Revolution, in Haitian Creole Revolisyon Ayisyen, was a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti.

The revolt began on 22 August 1791, and ended in 1804 with the former colony's independence. It involved black, biracial, French, Spanish, British, and Polish participants -with the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerging as Haiti's most charismatic hero.

The revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery, though not from forced labour, and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World.

The revolution's effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms the former slaves won and, with the collaboration of already free people of color, their independence from white Europeans.

The revolution represented the largest slave uprising since Spartacus' unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier, and challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged black inferiority and about slaves' ability to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels' organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners in the hemisphere.

Much of Caribbean economic development in the 18th century was contingent on Europeans' demand for sugar. Plantation owners produced sugar as a commodity crop from cultivation of sugarcane, which required extensive labor. The colony of Saint-Domingue also had extensive coffee, cocoa, and indigo plantations, but these were smaller and less profitable than the sugar plantations. The commodity crops were traded for European goods.

More information: BBC

Starting in the 1730s, French engineers constructed complex irrigation systems to increase sugarcane production. By the 1740s Saint-Domingue, together with the British colony of Jamaica, had become the main supplier of the world's sugar. Production of sugar depended on extensive manual labor provided by enslaved Africans. An average of 600 ships engaged every year in shipping products from Saint-Domingue to Bordeaux, and the value of the colony's crops and goods was almost equal in value to all of the products shipped from the Thirteen Colonies to Great Britain.

The livelihood of 1 million of the approximately 25 million people who lived in France in 1789 depended directly upon the agricultural imports from Saint-Domingue, and several million indirectly depended upon trade from the colony to maintain their standard of living.

Saint-Domingue was the most profitable French colony in the world, indeed one of the most profitable of all the European colonies in the 18th century.

Slavery sustained sugar production under harsh conditions, including the unhealthy climate of the Caribbean, where diseases such as malaria (brought from Africa) and yellow fever caused high mortality.

In 1787 alone, the French imported about 20,000 slaves from Africa into Saint-Domingue, while the British imported about 38,000 slaves total to all of their Caribbean colonies. The death rate from yellow fever was such that at least 50% of the slaves from Africa died within a year of arriving, so while the white planters preferred to work their slaves as hard as possible, providing them only the bare minimum of food and shelter, they calculated that it was better to get the most work out of their slaves with the lowest expense possible, since they were probably going to die of yellow fever anyway.

The death rate was so high that polyandry -one woman being married to several men at the same time- developed as a common form of marriage among the slaves. As slaves had no legal rights, rape by planters, their unmarried sons, or overseers was a common occurrence on the plantations.

More information: World Atlas

In 1789, Saint-Domingue produced 60% of the world's coffee and 40% of the sugar imported by France and Britain. The colony was not only the most profitable possession of the French colonial empire, but it was the wealthiest and most prosperous colony in the Caribbean.

The colony's white population numbered 40,000; mulattoes and free blacks, 28,000; and black slaves, an estimated 452,000. This was almost half the total slave population in the Caribbean, estimated at one million that year. Enslaved blacks, regarded as the lowest class of colonial society, outnumbered whites and free people of color by a margin of almost eight to one.

Two-thirds of the slaves were African born, and they tended to be less submissive than those born in the Americas and raised in slave societies.

On the night of 21 August 1791, when the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose in revolt; thousands of slaves attended a secret vodou ceremony as a tropical storm came in -the lighting and the thunder were taken as auspicious omens- and later that night, the slaves began to kill their masters and plunged the colony into civil war.

To prevent military disaster, and secure the colony for republican France as opposed to Britain, Spain, and French royalists, separately or in combination, the French commissioners Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel freed the slaves in Saint-Domingue in their declaration of abolition on 29 August 1793.

In nationalistic terms, the abolition of slavery also served as a moral triumph of France over England, as seen in the latter half of the above quote.

More information: Aeon

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that
while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing,
and strove to lay its foundations among his people,
he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority.
He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists
for the insatiable gangsters that they were,
that there is no oath too sacred for them to break,
no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty,
destruction of human life and property
which they would not commit against those
who could not defend themselves.

C.L.R.James