Haitian Revolution

Abstract

The Haitian Revolution refers to a collection of slave revolts and military strikes beginning in August of 1791 that resulted in the eventual abolition of slavery in the French colony of Saint‐Domingue and its subsequent independence and rebirth in January of 1804 as Haiti, the first independent black nation of the American hemisphere.

Extermination and excess: Martial economies of poison

“…Having arrived under Napoleon Bonaparte to re-establish slavery on the island, General Donatien de Rochambeau, a sadistic white supremacist and supporter of slavery, trapped hundreds of Black Haitians into the holds of ships and asphyxiated them by pumping in sulphur dioxide gas from burning oil (Perry, 1996). This method of killing, called 'fumigational-sulphurous baths' (Pachoński and Wilson, 1986: 69), 'prison boats', or 'étouffoirs' [suffocators] (Daut, 2016;Dwyer, 2008), was coupled with mass drowning and the use of bloodhounds (Girard, 2013). The practice was not only a precursor to the gas chambers of the Holocaust 140 years later, but also to fumigation as a strategy of pest control.…”

“…Already here, then, we see a desire for large-scale extermination of unwanted beings coupled with utility as an animating rationale for fumigation. This slaughtering aimed at only the population of colour makes Daut (2016) write that 'revolutionary Saint-Domingue was a world in which the idea of "race war" was so well accepted that a language that reeked of genocidal imaginings was fairly ubiquitous', making it a precursor to 'the implementation of modern policies of eugenics and what has euphemistically been called "ethnic cleansing"' (Daut, 2016). 3 Some 80 years later, a long history of cyanide fumigation commenced, when the practice of releasing hydrogen cyanide gas under a tented tree was developed in 1886 in Los Angeles, paving the way for an industrial citrus empire in the valleys of Southern California (Romero, 2016).…”