Slave Rebellions and Mutinies Shaped the Age of Revolution (Review Essay)

The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution
Julius S. Scott
Verso, $24.95 (paper)

Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
Vincent Brown
Belknap Press, 2020, $35 (cloth)

The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution
Niklas Frykman
University of California Press, $32.95 (cloth)

The Age of Revolution (1770–1850), bookended by the American and French Revolutions on the one side and the Revolutions of 1848 on the other, is widely viewed as the progenitor of the modern Euro-Atlantic world. Its intellectual energy fused the liberal and republican ideas of John Locke with the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; its political energy fed off the struggles between the bourgeois and their aristocratic enemies. Although visionary hopes could meet crushing defeats—as they did during the popular risings of 1848—by the end, there were new parliamentary regimes, emerging nation-states, declarations of rights, and the eruption of an industrial age.

And yet, this classic narrative leaves out the most radical of the revolutions that exploded neither in continental Europe nor in North or South America, but in the Caribbean, on the island the French called Saint-Domingue and the victorious rebels would call Haiti (Ayiti), after its indigenous name.

Until recently, the Haitian Revolution and other Caribbean slave rebellions have been treated as sidebars to the Age of Revolution. In part this is because of a Eurocentrism that has long diminished the role of Black people in shaping history. But equally important, enslaved people didn’t fit an accepted image of political actors, and thus it was difficult for historians to see them standing alongside the signers of the Declaration of Independence in America, the Jacobins in France, the Bolivareans in Gran Colombia, the Mazzinians in Italy, or the Chartists in England: envisioning, allying, struggling, surmounting. This, despite such works as C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution and W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, which left little doubt about the political capacities of enslaved Blacks.

Nowadays, Eurocentrism is called out for its parochialism as well as its veiled racism. Historians are much more attentive to questions of empire and colonialism, so they place the events of the Age of Revolution in a much broader context. Circum-Atlantic and transnational histories abound and have exerted enormous influence on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century studies. The Haitian Revolution has itself been the subject of a rapidly growing scholarship, whether looking from the Caribbean out or from the Euro-Atlantic in. And there has been renewed interest in slave systems, the maritime world, and their relation to the development of capitalism.

Still, it is not entirely clear how the pieces of this newly expansive story come together: how we may reimagine and reconceptualize what the Age of Revolution would look like if viewed comprehensively from below and from above, if portrayed with a much larger array of political actors and a much greater sense of the scope and ambitions of international as well as local politics. And if understood as coinciding with—indeed, deeply interconnected to—an age of emancipation in which the most powerful slave regimes in the world were overthrown despite hesitation among Euro-American revolutionaries themselves. The three outstanding volumes under review here offer the materials for just such a reconsideration.