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The Horrors of Saint Domingo: An Inevitable Revolution?

Alex Richards said:
Ah Haiti, probably the Most Important Revolution Barely Anyone Has Heard Of.
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I think to some extent, beyond the obvious racism, it's because it's seen as a subplot in the French Revolution rather than its own thing. Which it was, in some ways. You couldn't remove the French revolution from it or it from the French revolution. The next article could be subtitled 'Why Louverture was wrong' and Louverture ended up far more a French revolutionary than a Haitian one, a 'Black Jacobin' to quote a man much smarter than I'll ever be.
 
I do have a loose idea for a Haitian Revolution goes okayish TL which involves a free-holding agrarian north and a sort of co-operative/profit-sharing south producing coffee rattling around in my head. The thing is it involves a very particular set of circumstances to work, and very particular people getting involved in those circumstances, if that makes sense.

The whole point is slavery is destroyed in the north and conversely withers away in the south and things are generally okay and Haiti isn't an international pariah and broken country.
 
Japhy said:
I hate to play the @Sulemain but you should check out the Revolutions podcast
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That one is quite interesting because up until that point, the podcaster is a fairly standard slightly-left-of-centre American progressive. His series on the French Revolution is very well done, but it's also very much in the tradition of the Liberal Anglosphere- there's a certain feeling that if they'd just stopped the train in about 1791 things would have worked out very well, thank you.

Over the course of covering Haiti, you can really hear Duncan getting angrier and leftier as he goes.
 
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Duncan's podcasts on Haiti are very listenable but you do sometimes get the impression that he's basically just narrating Black Jacobins to you. He obviously hasn't read a lot of the more modern research which is why some stuff that is much more controversial now, like the number of Polish defectors or Boukman's Jamaican past are repeated uncritically.

Having said that, if you've listened to them there's not much that will be new in the first two articles in this series. The third and fourth are about Haiti post revolution and so covers areas the podcast didnt.
 
Revolutions is stronger than The History of Rome which I stopped listening to once I realised how many errors I could regularly spot just on the basis of taking a couple of undergraduate papers.

However, the Revolutions podcast is best listened to in the spirit of 'this is like the first history book you read on the subject when you're a teenager'- you know, the great 1970s or 1950s volume that's wound up in the school library. It gets you hooked, so you read more- and discover that that first book really left a lot of stuff out.
It's not so much that there's a lot of stuff that's wrong, per se, it's just that the interpretation does tend to be old fashioned.

But I like it, it does get better as the series goes along and it is miles above Dan Carlin's stuff.
 
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