The Rise of the Haitian Peasantry

Just finished Johnhenry Gonzalez's "The War on Sugar: Forced labor, Commodity Production and the Origins of the Haitian Peasantry, 1791-1843" and found it to be a useful and accessible explanation of the rise of Haiti's peasantry from the Haitian Revolution to the fall of Boyer, when the Haitian state's dream of exporting sugar expired. Borrowing from Trouillot, Fick, Casimir, Dubois, Haitian sayings, and the author's own original ideas, Gonzalez traces the rise of a peasantry rooted in opposition to slavery, coercive labor systems, and the agro-industrial sugar plantation system.

By analyzing how subalterns destroyed and burned plantations, fled to the hills, mountains, forests, and the east, and last but certainly not least squatted, purchased, and invested in non-intensive export commodity production (principally coffee and dyewood), the Haitian Revolution's impact on Haiti and the system of slavery can be seen as a decades long process of eradicating Saint Domingue. This is the finest read in quite some time that I have encountered which analyzes Haiti's caporalisme agraire. the state against nation paradigm first employed by Trouillot, and the plethora of ways the ex-slaves and their descendants forged an independent existence that overturned the system of slavery and forced Haitian elites, beginning with Pétion, to issue land grants and accept the partition of estates.

Not just relevant to Haitian history, the broader patterns of post-emancipation Caribbean societies can be understood as emblematic of the Afro-Caribbean peasantry, which arose first in Haiti. How Haiti is so often ignored in discussing post-emancipation Caribbean societies is bizarre, but this dissertation goes a long way in elucidating the development of a peasantry without romanticizing their toil. Nonetheless, one wishes there was more discussion of the ideological underpinnings of how Haitian peasants approached the state and constructed their parallel 'world' next to the Haitian state.

Furthermore, if the author is correct in asserting that other scholars, such as Nesbitt or Sheller, imagine democratic impulses in the peasantry, why do so many of the author's points echo Sheller's?Specifically, in the autonomy and power of women, the rise of the Piquets in the 1840s, and perhaps even the ways the Haitian peasantry lacked deference for whites or owners of the states, while also praising Pétion and receiving acknowledgement as integral to the nation by even Boyer. That the Piquets also argued for expanding education, and upper-class groups likewise demanded change in the militarized republic dominated by Boyer with a liberal 1843 Constitution certainly speak to a wave of democratization that, however briefly, united some sectors of Haiti's elite with the growing peasantry.