The Haitian Revolution shaped how planters and pro-slavery intellectuals, abolitionists, and colonial bureaucrats thought about the possibilities, promises, and pitfalls of abolishing enslavement in the nineteenth-century Americas and Caribbean. Uncovering a distinct way of thinking about the Haitian Revolution, this article analyzes how Harriet Martineau’s representation of this revolution placed it under the fold of liberal abolitionism by tracing how liberal political economy grounded her abolitionism. For Martineau, the Haitian Revolution under Toussaint Louverture’s leadership illustrated how a state-managed emancipation process would reproduce and strengthen capitalist plantation production by transforming the enslaved into wage laborers. In this account, Martineau disavowed the conflict between Louverture’s use of state coercion to retain cultivateurs in plantations and cultivateurs ’ demands to obtain provision grounds. Engaging Martineau’s representation of the Haitian Revolution, this article expands scholarship that has explored how political thinkers in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world developed conflicting visions of revolutionary Saint Domingue.
Ricardo Vega León (Mon,) studied this question.