Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom by Paul Clammer (review)

Reviewed by: Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom by Paul Clammer Michael D. Brooks Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom. By paul clammer. London: Hurst, 2023. xiii + 378 pp. ISBN 978-1-78738-779-9. £25.00 (hardcover). The history of the Haitian Revolution customarily appears in one of three undergraduate history courses: the history of the Caribbean, the history of Atlantic Revolutions, or the history of modern France and its empire. In the vast majority of French history courses, however, instructors rarely discuss the events after the 1804 declaration of independence. Paul Clammer, a self-described nonacademic travel writer, has written Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom to rectify this omission. Clammer, who argues that the nation's postindependence historical narrative is largely unknown outside of Haiti, participates in a recent tendency of injecting the biography back into academic scholarship.11 This trend, which rejects a Marxist predisposition to concentrate on history from below, proposes that each part of society, ruler and commoner alike, possesses historical agency, and each element should be put into dialogue with the other. Some individuals of the Haitian End Page 340 Revolution are well-known, including Vincent Ogé, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Clammer hopes that his book will add Henry Christophe to that list by "shedding light on the path he took to build a proud and free Haiti" (p. 11). The book's importance for world history focuses on the near impossibility of a newly independent nation to function singlehandedly. Clammer demonstrates that just because an empire's former colony has declared independence does not automatically mean that its prerevolutionary links to other nations are immediately severed. Christophe's search for international legitimacy vacillated between diplomatic lobbying and soft power. Christophe made entreaties to the British to gain their recognition of Haiti's independence and to establish trade relations, both of which were attempts to gain Britain's protection from future skirmishes with France. British abolitionists, attracted by the possibility of witnessing a nation transform its society from slavery to freedom, corresponded directly with Christophe, demonstrating the interconnectedness of Haiti and a world power. The same, however, cannot be said about France. While the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte reopened the door to new diplomatic relations with France, the French overtly aspired to recapture and to re-enslave its former colony, both of which Christophe promptly rejected. A former colony's declaration of independence always raises questions of continuity or change once the new leader assumes control. Clammer does an excellent job of demonstrating the ways in which newly independent Haiti sought to preserve many of its prerevolutionary institutions. Dessalines adopted Louverture's title of governor-general, enabled himself to appoint his successor, and believed that plantation agriculture was the best economic route to reconstruction. Dessalines also ordered the resurrection of Louverture's identity card system as a means to lower the number of absconding cultivators. After Haiti was split into a kingdom and a republic due to a post-independent civil war, Christophe, who founded the Kingdom of Haiti in the north, resorted to using French methods to "micromanage the lives of his people, taking land from would-be farmers seeking their own independence through self-sufficiency in order to put them back to work growing the very crops they had once burned in revolutionary defiance" (p. 9). Christophe's kingdom maintained the plantation system of prerevolutionary days instead of opting for private property rights as practiced in the Haitian republic. Since many Haitians were accustomed to a king as head of state, Christophe's coronation mimicked that of Napoleon Bonaparte as a means of cementing his legitimacy as ruler. Christophe also established a hereditary nobility, End Page 341 mirroring the monarchical hierarchy of Europe. These elements of continuity suggest that independent Haiti and Christophe's subsequent kingdom differed little from the colony's prerevolutionary days under French rule. The greatest disappointment with the book is its editing. Even though the English language has, over time, lost the majority of its grammatical differentiations, the distinction between "who" and "whom...