In recent decades, scholars have pushed for an approach to the Atlantic world that moves beyond and between political and linguistic borders in order to understand the movement of people and products across economic and legal jurisdictions. This approach has opened up the field to allow for innovative research that highlights the fluidity of the geographical space that constituted the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
Matthew Smith's well-researched and beautifully written Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation, reveals the extent to which the Atlantic must also be interpreted from a regional perspective. The Caribbean, he argues, was and continues to be a place of circulation and migration as families, businesses and politics connected the islands. His research reveals how imperial, national and linguistic boundaries faded as a trans-Caribbean community emerged and came to define the region.
To highlight the complex and multi-layered connections within the Caribbean, Smith recounts the interwoven histories of Haiti and Jamaica in the long nineteenth century. These two ‘emancipation societies’ (p. 11) had been connected in multiple ways: as slavery-based plantation societies, by their struggles between an elite and a labouring population who each envisioned freedom differently, and the political conflict that resulted from the lasting remnants of racial and class hierarchies despite the changing legal contexts of political enfranchisement. But they were also different. Most obviously, Jamaica remained a colony while Haiti was the second independent country in the Americas.
Smith reveals that the two islands developed together, in part because of their proximity. He skilfully demonstrates ‘the presence of each in the worldview of the other’ (p. 3). These were connections that went beyond economic, political and personal relationships as the two islands grappled with the changes wrought by the Age of Revolution and its aftermath. This worldview was shaped by fear and inspiration, migration, politics, economics, labour, racism, natural and human disaster, disease, and religion.
Smith bases his argument on international, multi-site archival research and he expertly crafts a narrative based on laws, government proclamations and debates, newspapers, travellers’ accounts, diplomatic correspondence, merchants’ records, and court documents. His sources reveal the layered problems that Caribbean societies faced as they transitioned from slavery to freedom. Key events during the long nineteenth century, he shows, disrupted and propelled the trajectory of Haiti and Jamaica's transitions to freedom.
Smith's narrative begins with abolition in Jamaica and he argues that this momentous event shaped the rest of the nineteenth century and encouraged closer ties between Haiti and Jamaica as a result of their shared experiences as each grappled with the revolutionary changes wrought by the collapse of their plantation economies. Political instability and economic decline further destabilised the existing social orders and remained constant features of the long nineteenth century. Critical national and colonial events in each island punctuated this period and further complicated the internal and international political and economic milieu.
At the time of the abolition of slavery in Jamaica, Smith tells us, Haiti and Jamaica were already intertwined. The Haitian Revolution bound the islands through military occupation, migration and debates about the future of slavery in the Caribbean. These existing connections were both antagonistic and collaborative.
Beginning with the abolition of slavery in Jamaica, however, the connections between Haiti and Jamaica tightened with similarly ambiguous outcomes. A trade agreement between Haiti and Jamaica in 1838 facilitated and expanded travel and business relationships. Haiti's relative economic prosperity (despite the collapse of sugar production) inspired Jamaicans for a brief and rare moment to see Haiti as an example of how they too might succeed as a post-slavery economy.
In the early 1840s, however, natural and human disasters instigated and exacerbated political and economic turmoil and revealed the limits of the stability that Haiti's president Jean-Pierre Boyer maintained during his 23-year term. Following his overthrow in 1843, Haiti plunged into political crisis as one rebellion after another led coup d’états in Port-au-Prince. Boyer was the first of many political leaders over the course of the next seven decades who took advantage of Britain's liberal asylum policies by taking refuge in Jamaica.
Class and colour conflicts shaped the social and political life of both islands and often led to migration between the two islands. Observers watched carefully and attempted to prevent similar experiences on their own islands while also denying their similarities. Political revolutions or rebellions in each island wreaked havoc on the economy and shaped foreign perceptions of each government's ability for self-rule.
The long nineteenth century closed, Smith argues, with increasing economic and political involvement from the United States. The US occupation of Haiti in 1915 and the Great War sent Haiti and Jamaica on separate paths as each grappled with issues that were much more specific to their internal contexts and therefore ended the more than a century of shared experiences.
The stories of the individuals and families who shaped formally and informally the separate and intertwined histories of Haiti and Jamaica will no doubt inspire further research on Caribbean colonies and nations. One of Smith's most important contributions to the broader historiography is to encourage scholars to include regional migration and re-migration as key components of the political, social and economic forces that bound the distinct geopolitical entities of the Caribbean into a single regional unit. Much more remains to be learnt about the multiple ways in which the well-established political and economic systems of the plantation societies were overturned in the long nineteenth century and how local leaders struggled to reconcile the incongruous goals of the diverse residents in each society. Smith demonstrates the importance of a regional approach to the complex and multi-layered connections within the Atlantic world while never losing sight of the distinctive pressures that pushed and pulled Haiti and Jamaica in different ways as they travelled together through the nineteenth century.
