"The Slave-Holding Republic"
Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4864
Date Written:  2017-01-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21529

Book review of Gerald Horne's Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The Haitian Revolution, by far the most radical of the late 18th and early 19th century revolutions that transfixed and transformed the Atlantic world, is less frequently the subject of academic study than its immediate precursors. Likewise, there is a dearth of cultural knowledge about Haiti and its history.

The mention of Haiti conjures in the minds of Americans an impoverished, desperate country. Most have little knowledge of how it arrived in its current condition. Horne's history seeks to correct that lack of knowledge.

Horne's work extends and expands the trajectory of The Black Jacobins: Touissant L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a 1938 classic by C.L.R. James, an Afro-Trinidadian historian and revolutionary. As did James, Horne traces the world-shattering impact of the Haitian Revolution. Horne carries the narrative into the 19th century, excavating the transformative impact of the Haitian revolt on Europe and, most particularly, the United States.