Features Editor Michael Keating Dake reflects on the historical significance of the Haitian Revolution, and considers the role of scholars of the humanities and social sciences in illuminating this important chapter of history.
As we reflect on the Haitian Revolution during Black History Month, its continued relevance to modern struggles for racial justice and equality becomes all the more apparent. The revolution’s legacy speaks directly to contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter, movements which seek to dismantle systems of racial oppression.
The Haitian Revolution reminds us that freedom is not simply granted, but rather must be fought for, often at an immense cost. It also emphasises the importance of unity and solidarity among oppressed peoples, as Toussaint L'Ouverture and his followers demonstrated by building coalitions across racial and social lines, a tactic echoed by later champions for racial equality and social justice, such as Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King Jr.
The Haitian Revolution serves as a powerful counter-narrative to the idea that enslaved Black people were passive victims of their circumstances. Instead, it affirms the agency, resilience, and revolutionary spirit of people who refused to capitulate to their subjugation. This revolutionary spirit continues to inspire movements for liberation today, whether in the form of protests against police brutality or military violence across the globe.
I learned about the achievements, accomplishments, and experiences of these revolutionary leaders in the ‘Radicals and Revolutionaries’ module offered by the UCD School of History. Studying their contributions to Black history and indeed global history is an extremely important task for scholars of the humanities and social sciences. Having worked on a research essay and immersed myself in literature on the period, I embarked on a journey to learn more about the voices of those who were excluded from the historical record. This reading has inspired me to delve into the “forgotten” stories of those who struggled for justice and liberation throughout history, and illustrates the power of a humanities education in promoting deep thought and reflection on important social and political issues.
Beginning in 1791, the revolution resulted in the establishment of the first sovereign state founded by formerly enslaved people, and became the first society on Earth to formally abolish all forms of slavery. Launching a daring war of independence against the French colonial empire, the people of Haiti astonished the entire Atlantic world with their military acumen. The notion that enslaved people could collectively organise and advance their objectives challenged European concepts of racial hierarchy and domination.
Across the Atlantic, France was undergoing a seismic societal shift of its own. The French revolution, which began in 1789, extolled the virtues of Republican values: “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!” Despite these calls for the creation of an egalitarian society, France continued to colonise land across vast swathes of Africa, the Caribbean, East and South-East Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and the Americas. Imposing its sovereignty on indigenous peoples, its calls for liberty and equality were exposed as hypocrisy by the resistance of the Haitian population to French colonial rule and slavery.
This intriguing chapter of history invites us to reflect on the role of geopolitical power and exigency in shaping our world, and on the agency and ability of people to resist their subordination to hegemonic power structures.
The Haitian Revolution also invites us to consider the erasure of marginalised peoples from the mainstream historical record. While the American Revolutionary War of Independence, the French Revolution, and indeed the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798 are all included on the public school curriculum, the experiences and accomplishments of racially marginalised peoples are conspicuously absent from much of the global history syllabus in Ireland, despite their global relevance.
This gives all students of history cause to pause and reflect on the voices and perspectives that are omitted from the historical record. Consider the words of Haitian-born historian Michel Rolph Trouillot, who argues that “mentions and silences are (...) active, dialectical counterparts, of which history is the synthesis.” Learning about this important moment in colonial history has informed my approach to research and analysis and inspired me to consider the role of the humanities in providing a voice to the voiceless.
The information and ideas contained in this article are drawn from secondary literature and academic research conducted by various scholars and historians who have been duly credited and cited as sources in the list of further reading at the foot of the article. A huge thank you to the academic staff at the UCD School of History for compiling these invaluable sources into the reading lists for the module ‘Radicals and Revolutionaries HIS10450,’ which shaped much of the author’s thinking on this fascinating chapter of Trans-Atlantic history. A huge thank you to Dr Jeremiah Garsha, Dr Jennifer Keating, and Dr Hussein Omar for their work on this module.
For further reading, check out the following texts, all of which are included in the bibliography of the UCD School of History module ‘Radicals and Revolutionaries HIS10450.’
The texts and sources outlined below were used for researching this article and my own academic work, and I thank the historians and scholars who authored them for their contributions to the academic research and scholarly literature available on this period of history:
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, 2005.
Ghachem, Malick. ‘The antislavery script: Haiti’s place in the narrative of Atlantic revolution,’ in Keith Baker & Dan Edelstein (eds), Scripting revolution: A historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions. Stanford, 2015. pp. 148-167.
Hazareesingh, Sudhir. Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture. London, 2020.
Heller, Henry. ‘Hegel, Haiti and Revolution: the Post-Colonial moment,’ in Third World Quarterly 41, no. 8 (2020), pp. 1442-1461.
James, C.L.R.. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York, 1989.
Reinhardt, Thomas. ‘200 Years of Forgetting: Hushing up the Haitian Revolution’ in The Journal of Black Studies 35, no. 4 (2005), pp. 246-261.
Salt, Karen. The Unfinished Revolution: Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Liverpool, 2019.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, 1995.