Abolishing slavery was no cause for smugness

When the 13 colonies of the United States declared independence in 1776, the first country to recognise the new nation was France. Other leading European powers, such as Britain and Spain, acknowledged its arrival at the Treaty of Paris, two years after a decisive victory by American forces. Yet when Haiti asserted independence in 1804, it was ostracised by Britain, France, Spain and the US. During its first fragile years as a fledgling state, that self-declared guru of liberty Thomas Jefferson even imposed a rigid blockade while president. Washington then took more than half a century to recognise its Caribbean neighbour.

The reason for such contrasting attitudes towards the first and second independent nations in the western hemisphere was simple. The island of Hispaniola, which today hosts Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the crown jewel of European colonies, the source of more than half the world’s coffee and almost a third of its sugar. These valuable crops were produced by the biggest slave population in the region, who were treated with hideous brutality until – partially inspired by the French revolution – they threw off their shackles. This historical turning point, an uprising of slaves that defeated the world’s two greatest powers and then banned white ownership of land, challenged the dominant and deeply racist view of the world.

As the Haitian historian Jean Casimir has written, his state was ‘born into a world that considered its very existence inconceivable and undesirable’. According to Kris Manjapra, a Bahamian-born professor of history at Tufts University, the new country became a cipher for racist tropes about barbarism and violence: ‘The idea of black freedom prompted sweaty night tremors about the fall of other plantation societies.’ France, having calculated that re-enslavement of the Haitian people was not possible by force, opted instead to make its former colony ‘kneel and crawl into the community of nations’ by paying a huge fee for freedom.