Friends of Freedom

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Micah Alpaugh
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
A Chain ◽  
American Party

From the Sons of Liberty to British reformers, Irish patriots, French Jacobins, Haitian revolutionaries and American Democrats, the greatest social movements of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions grew as part of a common, interrelated pattern. In this new transnational history, Micah Alpaugh demonstrates the connections between the most prominent causes of the era, as they drew upon each other's models to seek unprecedented changes in government. As Friends of Freedom, activists shared ideas and strategies internationally, creating a chain of broad-based campaigns that mobilized the American Revolution, British Parliamentary Reform, Irish nationalism, movements for religious freedom, abolitionism, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and American party politics. Rather than a series of distinct national histories, Alpaugh shows how these movements jointly responded to the Atlantic trends of their era to create a new way to alter or overthrow governments: mobilizing massive social movements.

Emotion and Political Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Eustace
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

This chapter examines how political history is reshaped by attention to the emotions. It explores how sentiment undergirded political identities and allegiances and how emotion shaped civic memory and consciousness in revolutionary and early-nineteenth-century America. From the American Revolution to the French Revolution to the Haitian Revolution, from the rise of eighteenth-century republicanism to the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalism, emotion proved pivotal to political change. Whether animating the spirit of freedom or sparking action on behalf of the nation, emotion was, by definition, central to patriotism in all its dynamic forms. In addition to this, the chapter also considers why emotions have been excluded from traditional political narratives.

Contentious Institutions and Party Orders in American Politics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Hejny ◽  
Adam Hilton
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Party Development ◽  
State And Society ◽  
American Party ◽  
Over Time

What are political parties, and how and why do they change? These questions are foundational to party research, yet scholars of American parties disagree about the answers. In this paper we present a new theoretical framework capable of bridging these scholarly divides and coming to terms with American party politics today. We argue that political parties should be seen as fundamentally contentious institutions. Due to their mediating position between state and society, parties are subject to rival claims of authority from a range of political actors, including elected officeholders, party officials, interest groups, and social movements. To manage intraparty contention, win elections, and govern, entrepreneurs construct and maintain party orders -- institutional and ideational arrangements that foster an operational degree of cohesion and constraint through time. Together, the dynamics of intraparty contention and the rise and fall of distinct party orders over time illuminate the patterns of American party development.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Abolitionist sentiments had long circulated in the British Atlantic world, but it was not until the 1760s in Virginia that they gained political traction in a colony dependent on slave labor. The politics of reproduction explain the success of abolitionism in this time and place: Virginia was unique among Britain’s colonies because, by the mid-eighteenth century, its slave population was growing, and wealthy planters had no need for fresh recruits. The American Revolution depleted the slave populations in the Caribbean, however, because it disrupted both the slave trade and the flow of imported foodstuffs. Consequently, British politicians began to fantasize, by the 1780s, that Caribbean slave societies could mimic the demographic success in North America in order to enjoy the economic benefits of a plentiful labor supply and allow for the abolition of the slave trade. This vision for reform was postponed, however, by geopolitical developments, including the Haitian Revolution.

“An Observance of Silence to the Events”

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-70
Author(s):  
Shelby Johnson
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Caribbean History ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Juliet Granville, the protagonist of Frances Burney’s novel The Wanderer (1814), enters the novel fleeing the French Revolution and disguised in blackface. This article argues that Juliet’s act of racial counterfeiting implicitly gestures toward the Haitian Revolution without naming that historical touchstone and emblematizes a theory of trace histories that Burney articulates in the novel’s dedication. There, she sketches an agonistic vision of history through what she calls “traces,” where events “though already historical, have left traces” that have been “handed down . . . from generation to generation” and tarry in the present. Burney frames the trace as an afterlife of an event that cannot be quite integrated into the broader scope of “history” as such but which leaves behind profound formal remainders. Burney’s dedication thus theorizes how to read Romantic-era novels for those fragments of form, and Juliet’s disguise replots erasures of Caribbean history as a problem of reading.

Missverhältnisse. Nietzsche und die Sklaverei

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Iris Därmann
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Like Hegel, Marx and Engels, Nietzsche has made the Haitian Revolution “unthinkable” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot). He provokes his readers by justifying slavery in the ancient and in the modern world. In order to indicate the problematic dimension of Nietzsche’s cultural legitimation of slavery it is necessary to situate his ideas in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, we need to ask whether his anti-democratic statements regarding the French Revolution could be understood as a “hyper-democratic” commitment to a “coming democracy” (Jacques Derrida) that resists slavery. I raise the question whether Nietzsche, in this context, considers the possibility of overcoming the institution of slavery in modern Europe.

On Counterrevolution

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-75
Author(s):  
Friedemann Pestel
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Political Program ◽  
The Status ◽  
French Case ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Political Objective

After 1789, counterrevolution emerged as revolution’s first counterconcept in French political discourse. While scholars of the French Revolution commonly associate counterrevolution with a backward-oriented political program, often with the restoration of the ancien régime, this article challenges such a retrograde understanding. Drawing on a broad corpus of sources, it emphasizes the flexible and pluralistic meanings of counterrevolution during the 1790s. Rather than designating a political objective, counterrevolution first of all focused on the process of combating the revolution as such, which allowed for different political strategies and aimed beyond a return to the status quo ante. By discussing, next to the French case, examples from the Haitian Revolution, Britain, Germany, and Switzerland, this article also highlights the transnational dimension of the debate on counterrevolution. It concludes with a plea for rethinking counterrevolution as revolution’s asymmetric other in a more relational rather than dichotomous perspective.

The Sublime Turn Away from Empire: Wordsworth's Encounter with Colonial Slavery, 1802

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Kelly Persyn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Eventual Death ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract "The Sublime Turn Away from Empire" argues that the Haitian Revolution—and Toussaint l'Ouverture's role in it—heavily influenced Wordsworth during his early years and that the1802 sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture epitomizes the poet's development of the "sublime turn." The Wordsworthian sublime, often interpreted in part as a reaction to the violence of the French Revolution, thus appears in this article as a reaction to the frightening and incomprehensible facts of colonial slavery and revolution—the very realities responsible for L'Ouverture's capture, imprisonment, and eventual death in France's Fort de Joux. In this context, the poet formulates his sublime turn as a turn away from the recognition of material slavery and bondage and toward an imaginative freedom nationed specifically English. In pursuing the argument, the article reviews the history of the Haitian Revolution together with the history of Wordsworth's poetic development from 1790 to 1802. In paying special attention to the 1802 sonnets, the article highlights Wordsworth's juxtaposition of French slavery and English liberty and draws on work by Laura Doyle and Alison Hickey to argue that Wordsworth's valorization of nature and nation has the effect of sublimating his own, and his reader's, recognition of empire and race. Ultimately, though Wordsworth speaks of l'Ouverture in a markedly admiring tone, he counsels him to submit to Napoleonic tyranny anyway—while taking comfort in the material sublime. The article explores this paradox and concludes by postulating that such a contradiction is characteristic of Romantic-era attitudes toward race and the sublime.

Port-au-Prince and the Collapse of French Imperial Authority, 1789–1793

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-84
Author(s):  
Jeremy D. Popkin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Revolution Francaise ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Colonial Order

Abstract The establishment of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804 was made possible by the collapse of imperial authority early in the French Revolution. Events in the colony's capital, Port-au-Prince, had much to do with that collapse. Between the fall of 1789, when news of the storming of the Bastille reached Saint-Domingue, and the spring of 1793, when French revolutionary authorities recognized that their only hope of maintaining control of the colony was to ally themselves with its black and mixed-race populations against the remaining whites, Port-au-Prince was the most troubled of the island's urban centers and one of the most unstable sites in France's transatlantic empire. Understanding how Port-au-Prince went from a center of colonial authority to a locus of disorder where fatal wounds were inflicted on the colonial order is crucial to any explanation of the background to the Haitian Revolution. L'établissement de la nation indépendante d'Haïti en 1804 fut rendu possible par la faillite de l'autorité impériale pendant les premières années de la Révolution française. Les événements dans la capitale coloniale de Port-au-Prince ont joué un grand rôle en précipitant cette faillite. Entre l'automne de 1789, quand la nouvelle de la prise de la Bastille est arrivée à Saint-Domingue, et le printemps de 1793, quand les autorités révolutionnaires dans la colonie ont reconnu que leur seul espoir de la maintenir sous leur contrôle fut de s'allier avec les populations noires et de couleur contre les blancs, Port-au-Prince fut la ville la plus troublée de Saint-Domingue et l'un des sites les plus perturbés de tout l'Empire français. Une compréhension du processus qui a fait d'un centre d'autorité dans la colonie un foyer de désordre où des coups fatals furent portés contre l'ordre impérial est cruciale pour expliquer le succès de la Révolution haïtienne.

Conceiving Fertility in the Age of Abolition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Labor Force ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
White Women ◽  
Political History ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Pivotal Moments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

The story of the Afro-Caribbean midwife Doll illuminates the politics of midwifery on Newton plantation in Barbados. It is well known that midwives wielded a great deal of power, but the racial dynamics of that power have received less attention. Doll’s story indicates that she vied with white women for the position of midwife, and that the former were viewed by the plantation’s white managers as more responsible guardians of the reproduction of the labor force. Plantation managers therefore eventually took steps to replace Doll with a white midwife. The Newton ledgers allow us to correlate the timing of pivotal moments in Doll’s career with pivotal moments in the political history of the Atlantic world. Her rise to power came during the massive disruptions caused by the American Revolution, and her removal from office came during the backlash against elite Afro-Barbadians caused by the Haitian Revolution.

scholarly journals Slaveriets profitabilitet. Økonomi og moral i fransk melodrama om den haitianske revolution, 1792-1798

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (71) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Ross Kjærgård
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
Slave Revolt ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

Jonas Ross Kjærgård: “The Profitability of Slavery. Economy and Morals in French Melodrama on the Haitian Revolution, 1792-1798”This article investigates how French revolutionary melodrama depicted the institution of slavery after the outbreak of the Haitian revolution in 1791. Prior to the slave rebellion in France’s most important Caribbean colony, St.-Domingue (present day Haiti), abolitionary writers and intellectuals had presented the argument that slavery was not only morally wrong but also economically unprofitable. For the more radical writers of the 1770s, such as Abbé Raynal and Louis-Sébastien Mercier, slavery was an evil that called for revolutionary violence in the colonies. However, when news of the actual slave revolt and its violent incidents reached France, the stance on violence and the interconnection of morals and economy changed. Through a reading of three plays the article aims to show that the Haitian revolution – as well as the radicalization of the French revolution – caused play writers to condemn violence among the slaves; to urge rebelling slaves to return to the plantations; and to present a colonial system in which slaves became free workers in return for their promise to work hard and accept the continuation of French colonial rule.

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