A Turbulent Time

This volume examines developments within several societies in the Greater Caribbean during the revolutionary period to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutions on the region. People who lived through the age of the French Revolution often felt the world had entered a chaotic new era. Welding a dynamic ideology of liberty and equality, a new concept of state power, and a nascent sense of nationalism, revolutionary France and its Napoleonic successor plunged Europe into a quarter-century of warfare and tumultuous change. Outside of Europe, the region most threatened and in some ways most affected by this upheaval was the plantation zone surrounding the Caribbean sea, which was then of extreme importance to the European and North American economies. Built precariously on the massive exploitation of slave labor, organized according to the doctrine of racial discrimination, they were peculiarly vulnerable to the libertarian message of the French Revolution. That message proved all the more potent because it coincided with the emergence of the antislavery movement in the Atlantic world and interacted with local traditions of resistance among the region's slaves, free coloreds, and white colonists. Separate struggles in the French Caribbean colonies for colonial autonomy, racial equality, and slave emancipation progressively forced these issues into the program of the revolution in France and enormously magnified its threat to the Caribbean status quo. The French banning of racial discrimination in 1792 and abolition of slavery in 1794 were milestones in American history. What perhaps mattered most for people who lived in the Caribbean was that these legislative victories were won by force of arms in vicious local conflicts. The epic transformation of Saint Dominique into the independent black state of Haiti (1797-1804) was an inflammatory example of self-liberation and a dramatic symbol of resistance. It was a major revolution in its own right. This book examines several dimensions of the impact of these two interconnected revolutions on what may be called the Greater Caribbean. David Barry Gaspar, Professor of History at Duke University, is the author of Bondmen and Rebels, and co-editor (with Darlene Clark Hine) of More Than Chattel. David Patrick Geggus, Professor History at the University of Florida, is the author of Haitian Revolutionary Studies and Slavery, War, and Revolution.