Re: British emancipation

[Carl Remick <carlremick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> NY Times Book Review, January 9, 2005
> 'Though the Heavens May Fall' and 'Bury the Chains': Freed
> By MARILYNNE ROBINSON

[In the context of America's imperial misadventure in Iraq, I think
Robinson's remarks about Britain and France finding Haiti too hot to handle
are particularly interesting:]

... [Among the prime reasons contributing to the slave trade's end,] there
were the rebellions in the West Indies, particularly the Haitian rebellion
... an astounding, and forgotten, episode in Western history. Since Haiti
alone produced as much foreign trade at that time as the whole of the 13
colonies of North America, it was potentially a great loss. It belonged to
France, but Britain supplied it with slaves, a valuable trade since the
slaves were intentionally worked to death -- it was cheaper to replace them
than to sustain them -- so the market for Africans was very brisk. Uprisings
had long been frequent in the West Indies, but at long last rage in Haiti
converged with the tactical brilliance of Toussaint L'Ouverture and others
and the slaves seized the island. This part of the story is familiar. But
there is more.

First the British and then the French under Napoleon sent huge forces
against the Haitians. The British sent a larger army against Haiti than it
had dispatched to fight in the American Revolution. And it buried 60 percent
of those soldiers in Haiti. The two greatest powers on earth went up against
a population of half-starved, desperate people and were utterly defeated. It
is no surprise that these two abysmal wars of empire have fallen out of
history. One cannot read about them without concluding that the Haitian
Africans contributed mightily to making the Caribbean slave system
untenable. All in all, in 1807 the prospects of the traffic in human beings
were not good. It is perhaps coincidental that in adopting the abolitionist
stance Britain was able to seize the moral high ground and attempt (together
with the United States) to suppress the slave trade among its economic
rivals. Certainly this posture was gallant enough to make a great part of
the world forget that Britain was for so long pre-eminent among the
despoilers of Africa. ...

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/books/review/09COVERRO.html>

Carl