Harriet Martineau, the Haitian Revolution, and Labor Discipline after Slavery

• In Event: Revolution, Resistance, and the State

Abstract

In her account of the Haitian Revolution, Harriet Martineau argued that Toussaint Louverture’s statesmanship transformed enslaved laborers into disciplined free plantation workers who cultivated sugar productively and did not rebel violently to break their bondage. Bringing together Martineau’s The Hour and the Man, a historical novel published in 1841 about Louverture’s political activities between 1791 and 1803, and her writings on slavery and abolition in the U.S. South and the British Caribbean, this paper analyzes how she used the tools of liberal political economy to present the Haitian Revolution as a state-led emancipation process that ended slavery in an orderly fashion and made the plantation economy more productive. By developing such an account, I highlight how Martineau contradicted dominant conceptions of this political event in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an excessively violent and bloody slave uprising that ruined Haiti’s sugar industry. Attending to Martineau’s writings on the Haitian Revolution makes two important contributions to the works of scholars like Susan Buck-Morss, Laurent Dubois, Sibylle Fischer, and Adom Getachew, who have traced said revolution’s influence on efforts to realize universal racial equality and freedom in radical abolitionist thought and politics. First, I foreground the importance of political-economic categories and processes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of the Haitian Revolution. Second, I underscore how anti-slavery thinkers like Martineau, whose projects to end slavery indexed the reproduction of capitalist social relations in post-emancipation societies, disavowed the revolutionary elements of the Haitian Revolution and instead argued that it was a model for relying on state power to ensure that the formerly enslaved would become disciplined free plantation workers.

Author

• Ricardo Vega Leon, Rutgers University