Julia Gaffield first came to my attention in April 2010, when the New York Times reported that she, then a graduate student at Duke University, had found the first original printed version of the Haitian Declaration of Independence in the National Archives, Kew (London). Librarians, archivists and historians whose work had been dedicated to the fascinating history of the Haitian revolution appreciated the relevance of this document and shared the excitement of her discovery.
On reading Gaffield's Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution it became clear to me that her 2010 discovery was not fortuitous. It was the result of extensive and thorough research that took her to seven countries and a dozen different archives. Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World is grounded in Gaffield's firm conviction that Haiti's past is much larger and complex than we have imagined. Haiti's history is not to be found only in Haiti and its rich archives – which Gaffield visited as well – but in other regions, such as Jamaica, Great Britain, France, the United States, the Netherlands and Denmark. In all these places, Gaffield found relevant sources that allowed her to unravel the vibrant history of Haiti's incipient political, diplomatic and commercial connections with the Atlantic world and the different strategies that its leaders implemented to help the nascent republic find a place of its own.
The introduction, the conclusion and the five elegantly written chapters of Haitian Connections constitute a relevant and impressive contribution to the history of nineteenth-century Haiti and its fragile yet significant presence in the Atlantic world. Gaffield provides ample evidence that contradicts the long-held scholarly consensus that the empires and nations of the Atlantic world collectively isolated the island after its Declaration of Independence in 1804. She argues and provides evidence to the effect that, after its independence, the Haitian government succeeded in establishing multiple relevant connections with different empires, nations and colonies in the region (pp. 3–6).
This book captures the complex ways foreign agents interacted with Haiti during and after the period of diplomatic non-recognition and offers a thought-provoking approach to the manifold political and diplomatic strategies that Haitian leaders employed to prevent both invasion and isolation. Gaffield's focus on the diplomatic, economic and legal connections between Haiti and other nations allows her to show that race and slavery were not the only factors that influenced international reactions to the first Black republic of the western hemisphere. In fact, most of the cases she studies prove that imperial conflicts, economic interests and commercial incentives took precedence over racial preoccupations (p. 69).
In the first chapter, Gaffield traces how French officials in the Caribbean tried (and largely failed) to establish a general blockade to isolate Haiti. She studies in particular Haiti's ongoing commercial and economic relations with the islands of Curaçao and Saint Thomas, and proves that, despite France's arduous efforts to restrict these connections, Haiti played an important economic role in the region that kept Dutch and Danish merchants and traders interested in engaging in commercial exchanges with the Haitian rebels. Although it is clear that European and American governments tried to prohibit trade with Haiti and issued several decrees to this purpose, these prohibitions remained largely ineffective. During the years immediately following its independence, Haiti established strong relationships with other regions of the Caribbean that allowed the island to maintain a healthy exports balance (p. 59).
Chapters 2 and 3 study the complex processes by which the British Empire extended informal and partial recognition to Haitian sovereignty. By analysing the multiple drafts for a commercial treaty that Jean Jacques Dessalines and George Nugent, lieutenant governor of Jamaica, exchanged between 1803 and 1806, Gaffield shows how Haitian leaders and British agents participated in a difficult balancing act. Haitian leaders were determined to defend their promise of universal freedom at home but, in order to prevent isolation or invasion, they committed not to disrupt the slavery system in the foreign colonies. British officials, for their part, aimed to control Haiti's trade and reap the greatest benefits from their commercial agreements without further interruption to colonialism and slavery in their Caribbean possessions.
Gaffield masterfully disentangles the constant tensions that emerged in these negotiations and offers a rich picture of the multiple strategies that actors on the ground (merchants, sailors, judges, lawyers and statesmen) followed to give informal diplomatic recognition to the nascent Republic. This is particularly evident in her examination of maritime cases and the role that British admiralty judges played in defining Haitian sovereignty; the dynamics of the legal disputes and final decisions show how economic policies influenced diplomatic agreements (p. 123). While Chapter 4 studies the contradictions and difficulties that various representatives of the US government encountered while defining Haitian sovereignty, the last chapter examines how the fragmentation of Haiti after the assassination of Dessalines in 1806 affected foreign perceptions of the nascent Republic and frustrated any attempt of their rulers – now Pétion and Christophe – to secure formal foreign recognition.
Gaffield offers an impressive reconstruction of Haiti's relationships with the larger Atlantic during the first years after the Declaration of Independence; however, the Spanish Atlantic is evidently missing from Gaffield's book. Recently, historians have been uncovering connections between Haiti and the Spanish Atlantic. The most recent example is Ada Ferrer's Freedom's Mirror, Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014) in which Ferrer splendidly analyses the complex political, military and economic circuits that connected Haiti and Cuba. Ferrer shows how Haiti offered its territory as a refuge to those who were escaping racial slavery and Spanish colonialism, but indirectly encouraged Cuba to remain ‘both a powerful slave society and a loyal colony of Spain’ (Ferrer, p. 15), and to resist any form of diplomatic or economic contact with Haiti.
Haiti's relationship with the Spanish Atlantic – especially the Spanish mainland – continues to be, however, a topic that deserves further exploration and analysis. In 1808, Napoleon's forces occupied Madrid and exiled the Spanish king to Bayonne, unleashing a profound political crisis in the Monarchy. Between 1810 and 1824, all the Spanish-American territories, with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico, went through turbulent periods of war that ended in their independence. During these times, Haitians rulers like Pétion followed Spanish-American events closely and sought new opportunities for their country. Sybille Fischer, for example, explores how during the early stages of the Venezuelan struggle for independence Haiti played a crucial role: it served as a safe haven for patriotic refugees from the mainland, provided military and financial support for the insurgents and forced the issue of slave emancipation (Fischer, ‘Bolívar in Haiti: Republicanism in the Revolutionary Atlantic’, in Raphael Dalleo, Carla Carlage and Luis Duno-Gottberg, eds., Haiti and the Americas (University Press of Mississippi, 2013)). The few but relevant studies that analyse the connections between Haiti and Spanish America argue that the Haitian republic not only represented an influential political model but also offered logistical support for proponents of Creole independence in the Spanish-American mainland. By 1815, Haitian leaders had changed their political strategy and were ready to place slavery and race at the centre of their political projects in relation to the nascent Latin American nations. Although Gaffield does not cover the Spanish Atlantic, her compelling history will certainly encourage other scholars and graduate students to visit Spanish and Latin American archives and offer more perspectives for the study of Haiti's crucial and complex connections with the Atlantic world.
