Haitian Revolution (1789–1804)

The revolution of 1789–1803 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue exhibited two contrasting types of armed conflict. Uprisings in 1791 by the enslaved and free colored sectors of colonial society gave rise to a long spate of irregular warfare often fought in mountainous and forested terrain. Unprecedented in their scale and outcome, these insurrections led in the period 1791–1793 to the abolition of slavery and of legalized racial inequality, and thereafter evolved into struggles for local autonomy and, in 1803, national independence. At the same time, Saint-Domingue was drawn into the French Revolutionary War and became a participant (and the major prize) in the last of the colonial wars of the Old Regime, in which the armies and navies of European powers had long fought one another for American territory. Both the revolutionary, internal conflict and the traditional, imperial conflict profoundly affected each other’s development, and they came to overlap a good deal in fighting styles and personnel. The revolution in Saint-Domingue is most easily understood as the pursuit of three political goals (freedom, equality, independence) by three social groups (the enslaved, free people of color, white colonists). It began as a struggle for self-government within the white community (1789–1791). This period saw very little armed conflict, although some soldiers mutinied or played political roles. The term Saint-Domingue Revolution, long favored by French writers, acknowledges the event’s multi-class nature and that national independence emerged only belatedly as a central issue. The Anglophone term “Haitian Revolution” and its coupling with the year 1791 is a fairly recent phenomenon; it stresses the primacy of the revolution of the enslaved and its links to the creation of the Haitian state in 1804. The global significance of Haiti’s revolution derives partly from its achievements (its precedence in the histories of antiracism, antislavery, and decolonization) but also because of where it took place. Europe’s main source of tropical produce, Saint-Domingue was a dynamo of the Atlantic economy, a major source of French government revenue, and an important stimulus to the growth of France’s navy.