History from below: The tragedy of a slave revolution

Empire of the Mind

Today, we take it for granted that history is not merely the story of great men and the elites from which they arise; that the underlying narratives of gender, class, exploitation, and rebellion add true context and insight to our understanding of the past. But this was not always so. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (TBJ) was one of the earliest, defining examples of how “history from below” ought to be written. It is a fascinating narrative of the world’s only successful slave revolution, in which Toussaint is the tragic hero. Born a slave, he transforms into the most significant revolutionary leader in the age of revolutions. “Yet Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint,” writes C L R James in his timeless classic of subaltern history.

Born in 1901 in Trinidad, then a British Crown colony, C L R James was the son of a schoolteacher. During his career, James lived in different countries and was variously a journalist, historian, and activist. He was also a committed Marxist philosopher. Noted for his influence on post-colonial studies, James lived for some years in the United States, but was deported in 1953 for his communist views. He eventually settled down in England and died in London at the age of 88.

James wrote TBJ, his best-known work in 1938, and it would later be seen as a foundational text in post-colonial studies. The book’s opening is spectacular: “Christopher Columbus landed first in the New World at the island of San Salvador, and after praising God enquired urgently for gold. The natives, Red Indians, were peaceable and friendly and directed him to San Domingo, a large island (nearly as large as Ireland), rich, they said, in the yellow metal. He sailed to San Domingo. One of his ships being wrecked, the native Indians helped him so willingly that very little was lost and of the articles which they brought on shore not one was stolen.”

The Spaniards, the most ‘advanced’ Europeans at the time, annexed the island, called it Hispaniola, and took the ‘backward’ natives under their protection. They introduced Christianity, forced labour in mines, murder, rape, bloodhounds, and hitherto unknown diseases. These and other requirements of the higher civilisation reduced the native population from an estimated half-a-million to 60,000 in 15 years.

By the late 18th century, and by then a French colony, San Domingo was the richest in the Caribbean. The sugarcane plantations based on the slave economy generated the surpluses, appropriated by the Europeans. Large numbers of slaves were transported from the West Coast of Africa to these islands in voyages of unimaginable cruelty. Once there, they were worked, most often to the death. Women rarely reproduced, because their bodies were typically too weak from the suffering inflicted by their masters.

In August 1791, after two years of the French Revolution and its repercussions in San Domingo, the slaves revolted against the profoundly brutal slave regime. The slaves defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. Led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the revolutionary struggle lasted 12 years and resulted in the establishment of the independent state of Haiti.

James transformed the way we look at colonial history. James places the enslaved people at the centre of their own story, demonstrating that their freedom came out of their collective mobilisation, and not as a result of the goodwill of the abolitionists. He focusses on the achievements and political personality of Toussaint, whose remarkable leadership brought about the end of slavery in Haiti. James explodes the myths surrounding abolitionism, arguing that it was financial self-interest that motivated the desire to end slavery. The British, James argues, were alarmed by the phenomenal wealth the Saint-Domingue colony brought their rivals, the French, and sought to cut-off the supply of enslaved people to the island with the aim of ruining the economy.

“With the tears rolling down their cheeks for poor suffering blacks,” writes James, “those British bourgeois who had no West Indian interests set up a great howl for the abolition of the slave-trade.”

Read TBJ. It challenges the reader to think critically about history. It celebrates the commitment, courage, and righteousness of the slave revolution. But good does not triumph over evil. After Napoleon reconquered Haiti, Toussaint L’ouverture was tricked into a meeting and arrested. He was sent to France, where he was imprisoned and died of pneumonia and malnutrition in 1803. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world today and presents a classic case of the past in the present. A tale not of unfortunate tragedy, but of deliberate human destruction.