13998: DAvis: FW: Book Review: Peabody on Sheller, Democracy After Slavery (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Karen F. Davis <kdavis@marygrove.edu>
From: 	Rosanne Adderley [mailto:adderley@mail.h-net.msu.edu]

Subject:	Book Review: Peabody on Sheller, Democracy After Slavery
Date:	Thu, 5 Dec 2002 06:17:16 -0500
From:	"Garrigus, John" <jgarrig@ju.edu>

H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by H-Caribbean@h-net.msu.edu (December 2002)
Mimi Sheller. _Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism
in Haiti and Jamaica_. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xvi +
270 pp. Tables, maps, notes, bibliography and index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-8130-1883-8.
Reviewed for H-Caribbean by Sue Peabody (peabody@vancouver.wsu.edu),
Department of History, Washington State University Vancouver
Peasant Political Culture in Post-Emancipation Haiti and Jamaica
This important comparative study brings to light the essential political
developments after emancipation in nineteenth-century Haiti and Jamaica.
Despite their disparate avenues toward emancipation (Haiti's as an abrupt,
militarized revolutionary juncture versus Jamaica's gradualist,
policy-driven process), Sheller finds striking similarities in the political
experiences of peasants in Haiti and Jamaica. Her study is focused primarily
on Afro-Caribbean struggles for political agency within two Franco- and
Anglo-Caribbean imperial sites. Yet Sheller regards Haiti's and Jamaica's
post-emancipation experiences as illuminating similar processes in Cuba, the
United States, and Brazil (p. 40). This challenging and powerful book should
be read widely for its theoretical insights on the historical process of
emancipation more generally.
The heart of this historical study is Sheller's revelation of the parallel
processes undergone in Haiti and Jamaica in the mid-nineteenth century,
after general emancipation. For Haiti, the process begins in the 1840s,
when, after several decades of civil war and state consolidation, a liberal
reform movement emerged, expelling Haiti's autocratic president Boyer.
However, tensions between the fragile civil authority, embodied by the new
legislature, and President Hérard, backed by the military, shattered the
alliance between the liberal bourgeoisie and the peasants.  Peasants in
southern Haiti, eager to make good on radical visions of democracy,
rebelled, prompting a reactionary crackdown by traditional power holders,
aided by the military. The result was the crushing of the nascent radical
democratic polity and the maintenance of a military autocracy.
Like Haiti, Jamaica experienced a period of radical democratic potential in
the 1860s when, in response to the plantocracy's exclusion of former slaves
from the civil polity, an alliance of missionaries, non-white politicians
and Native Baptist religious leaders mobilized in support of black political
enfranchisement. The Jamaican governor's refusal to respond to these demands
led to the rebellion at Morant Bay and its harsh repression by the military.
At this point London determined to replace the Jamaican House of Assembly
with Crown Colony Rule, making democratic engagement even more difficult for
the peasant population.
A work of historical sociology, _Democracy after Slavery_ relies heavily on
structural analysis of social relations more than detailed narration of
unfolding events. The study is strongly grounded in the historiography and
sociology of slavery; Sheller repeatedly returns to works by such historians
and theorists of slavery as Arthur Stinchecombe, Sydney Mintz, Michel-Rolph
Trouillot, Thomas Holt and David Nicholls in order to situate and
differentiate her own approach. This close attention to the historiography
makes for dense reading, but her mastery of the field is impressive and, if
the reader works to follow her, enlightening.
After a densely packed survey of the historiography of slavery and freedom
in the Caribbean (chapter 1), Sheller lays out the ways in which planter
control declined in the wake of emancipation. Jamaica and Haiti were the key
sugar-producing regions of the world in the late eighteenth century. In both
societies, sugar production (one of the most brutal and deadly industries
under slavery) fell off rapidly after slavery to be replaced by coffee (in
Haiti) and smaller export crops, such as ginger and coconut in Jamaica, as
well as peasant crops for internal consumption on both islands. In the
political arena, Haiti's elite was dominated by the largely mulatto planter
class in the south and the predominantly black military hierarchy in the
north. The Haitian state itself was relatively weak, functioning primarily
to conscript soldiers and levy taxes. There were few stable public
institutions like bureaucracies, courts, or schools. The Jamaican Assembly,
which initially represented the interests of the plantocracy, was far more
effective than Haiti's independent government in enforcing its own
legislation, much of which was designed to retain the subordination of the
freed population.
Sheller's chief contribution to the analysis of post-emancipation society is
her exploration of the avenues for civil agency. She points out that Haitian
elites' embracing of freemasonry (a secret society that fostered-for a
limited clique of insiders-debate and the ability to engage in the
development of policy) restricted the ability of the greater populace to
participate in civil discourse. Official limits on the Haitian press further
limited democratic discussion. In Jamaica, by contrast, the emergence of
black voluntary associations, an active press, and the capacity to elect
representatives to the Assembly yielded many avenues for former slaves to
exercise and voice their democratic ideals.
Chapter 3 analyzes Jamaican reactions to the Haitian revolution and how
whites and blacks used stories of Haitian independence as symbols of
repression or hope.  Sheller's account really takes off, however, in
chapters 4 through  8, when she works to discover the political agency and
civil imagination of the black peasant majorities of Haiti and Jamaica. This
is no mean feat, especially for Haiti, where illiteracy and the repeated
destruction of Haitian national archives has left few written sources that
reveal traces of the population's will.
In contrast to many historians of nineteenth-century Haiti who write off the
peasantry as "apathetic" or "backward," Sheller argues that Haitian peasants
were (and are) excluded from civic participation by the overweening role of
the military in relations between public and the state. Haiti's failure to
submit the military to civil control doomed the nascent democratic ideals to
atrophy and repression.
Working between twentieth-century ethnologies and fragments of
nineteenth-century historical evidence, in chapter 4 Sheller disproves the
received notion that the Haitian peasantry was a vast, unorganized, chaotic
mass. Instead she shows how patterns of land tenure, cooperative labor
associations and voluntary associations (fraternal or "friendly"
societies)--many of which are associated with religious practices and
communities-bound the peasants to one another in proto-democratic
organizations. However, the state's land redistribution system, with estate
size based upon military rank, reinforced the army's centrality in the
social order. The legal codes of Toussaint, Henri-Christophe and Boyer
forced all citizens who did not work for the state or engage in licensed
professions to "cultivate the land" (96). Mobility was legally restricted
(though this enforced with difficulty) and corporate land ownership
prohibited. The peasantry was excluded from civil participation largely due
to its illiteracy, which in turn reflects Haiti's lack of missionaries,
priests, and schools (p. 103).
In chapter 5, Sheller recounts Haiti's brief encounter with liberal
democratic ideals, which, she argues, was undone by state repression of
dissidents. Using public debates, newspapers, and the expansion of the
electorate (from a minimum of 25 years to 21 years), opponents of the
autocratic President Boyer forged links between bourgeois liberals and rural
smallholders. When Boyer sent troops to eliminate their protests, his rank
and file soldiers deserted en masse to the opposition coalesced around the
liberal mulatto leader Hérard. Boyer eventually abdicated, fleeing to
Jamaica. Haiti's subsequent constitution (1843) was, for Sheller, the apex
of liberal opportunity. Boyer's ouster was followed by a "revolution ...
within the revolution, when a locally influential black landholding family
mobilized the smaller landholders and coffee growers of the Aux Cayes region
to challenge the racial inequality of the liberal elite" (p. 112). This was
followed by a peasant revolt known as the Picquet movement, whose
participants, the self-proclaimed "army of sufferers," demanded economic and
land reform and the protection of their Haitian constitutional rights.
Sheller notes that the insurgents' motto-"The rich Negro who can read and
write is mulatto; the poor mulatto who cannot read nor write is Negro"-shows
the centrality of literacy to the peasants' exclusion from civil agency. The
Picquet movement was somewhat mollified with the election of a black
president, Guerrier, and Hérard was exiled to Jamaica. But ultimately, the
army of sufferers was forcibly disbanded and the new constitution of 1846
rescinded the more liberal provisions of 1843. For Sheller, the ascendance
of Emperor Faustin Soulouque in 1847 "was not the triumph of blacks over
mulattoes but the triumph of statist aristocracy over the potentially
democratic alliance of radical segments of the bourgeoisie with peasants and
cultivators" (p. 138).
Sheller's chapters on Jamaica during the apprenticeship and
post-emancipation period (chapters 6-8) are exceptionally detailed and
insightful. She amply demonstrates her principle argument-that numerous
formal and informal channels were open to (or asserted by) former slaves in
making their democratic aspirations known to the state. These include public
meetings, petitions, voluntary associations, trade and religious networks.
Sheller reviews a corpus of some sixty "public texts" generated through
political contention in Jamaica in the 1830s through the 1860s. But literacy
was not the only political tool of the black population. Sheller also
focuses on major instances of "riot" or violent protest to identify the aims
and bargaining strategies employed by the formerly enslaved population.
Whether a rowdy meeting turned violent was often dependent upon the "actions
and reactions of police, militias, courts and government officials" (p.
176). When more peaceful means of redressing injustice were dismissed by the
colonial government, black Jamaicans' frustration erupted in the Morant Bay
Rebellion of 1865.
The real power of Sheller's analysis comes forward in the final chapters on
the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, provocatively entitled, "'Little Agitators,
Small Speechifiers, and Embryo Cut-Throats." Here she offers an incisive
analysis of the political rhetoric of participants in the Morant Bay
Rebellion. Her reading of testimony gathered after the rebellion examines
not only the nuanced cadence of political speechifying, but also reveals the
wider connections between Jamaican activists and Afro-Caribbean political
agents throughout the region, especially the exiles from Haiti.
I was heartened to see Sheller's attention to the gendered nature of Haiti's
and Jamaica's peasant populations in the nineteenth century [1]. The
estimated population of Haiti in the 1830s was 500,000, "three-fifths of
which were thought to be women (a gender ratio probably due to high male
mortality during the years of revolutionary and civil war, higher male
infant mortality, and longer female life expectancy)." (p. 110) For
Jamaica's population of about 400,000, "non-white females outnumbered males
throughout the post-emancipation period, and formed the majority of the
population of the larger ports and towns" (p. 179). In both Haiti and
Jamaica, "women were responsible for local marketing ... Their mobility,
access to credit and centrality in networks of communication gave them a
greater degree of autonomy than other peasant groups. Yet, women were
excluded by definition from equal citizenship" (p. 159). Still-or perhaps,
because of-these dynamics, both Haitian and Jamaican women played key roles
in overt forms of resistance within the public sphere, including the liberal
opposition to Haiti's Boyer in the 1840s (p. 125) and violent resistance to
the repressive agents of the Jamaican state (p. 161).
One aspect that Sheller describes but does not explicitly define as a causal
agent in the distinct political climates of Haiti and Jamaica is the
intermediary role of white missionaries (the term "missionaries" is
regrettably absent in the index). Sheller accurately notes that there was no
formal arrangement with the Vatican for the arrival of French missionaries
in Haiti until 1860 and points out that the scarcity of missionary activity
and lack of a public education system in Haiti created a vacuum for literacy
and thus curtailed many avenues of civic participation on the part of the
peasantry. (Note, however, that missionaries from non-Francophone Protestant
denominations also traveled to independent Haiti, including some African
Americans.) By contrast, many missionaries in Jamaica, especially Baptists
who had worked for abolition, became vocal allies of emancipated slaves and
were instrumental in organizing many public meetings, petitions and
associations. Most importantly, the democratic processes entailed in these
organizations-public speaking, church elections, moving and seconding
resolutions-all gave former slaves immediate experience in empowering
political processes.
This brings to mind some of the comparisons that have been made between
France's and England's abolition movements. Seymour Drescher and others have
emphasized the importance of Non-Conformist religious revival movements in
19th-century England in mobilizing the mass petition drives that brought
pressure on Parliament to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself.
France's reliance on the judiciary (without a counterpart to the British
Parliament) to defy the executive powers of the monarchy partially helps to
explain why causes célèbres were an important venue for civic discourse in
France. It also explains why abolitionism was limited to elites and never
achieved the mass mobilization apparent in England. Sheller's argument-that
Haiti's inability to subordinate the military to civic powers of the state
gave the peasantry the narrowest means to voice their political concerns-is
well taken. But I am curious to know whether the culture of civic
participation is primarily a result of economic or political structures or
of broader cultural patterns. That is, did the more decentralized Protestant
religious practices help participants to feel a sense of agency and learn
mechanisms for expressing and acting upon collective will?
Sheller also draws attention to African, black-identified religious
movements in Haiti (Vodou) and Jamaica (Obeah, Myalism, and Native Baptists)
as means of expressing political will. One wonders whether the importance of
African political frames of reference were not important as well, for a
sizeable portion-perhaps two-thirds-of the generation that claimed
independence for Haiti was born in Africa [2]. It is interesting that the
mostly creole-born Jamaican protestors, when dissatisfied with the response
of the colonial government, addressed their petitions in part to the British
queen.
In sum, this is a provocative, dense, intelligent, ambitious, politically
and intellectually committed historical work of sociology "from the bottom
up." While of special interest to those who study slavery and emancipation
in Francophone and British Caribbean contexts, readers from U.S. and Latin
American contexts will find much of comparative and theoretical value here
as well.
[1]. Readers would do well to refer to her articles, "Sword-Bearing
Citizens: Militarism and Manhood in Nineteenth-Century Haiti" Plantation
Society in the Americas  4:2-3 [1997]: 233-278 and "Quasheba, Mother, Queen:
Black Women's Public Leadership and Political Protest in Postemancipation
Jamaica, 1834-65" Slavery and Abolition 19:3 [1998] 90-117, which expand in
greater depth on the gendered nature of the peasant publics in these
regions.
[2]. See John Thornton, "'I am the Subject of the King of Congo': African
Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution" Journal of World History 4:2
[1993]: 181-214.