Introductory description

This 15 CATS second-year module option introduces students to the tumultuous years across the European colonies of the Caribbean that followed the French Revolution and the subsequent outbreak of warfare between imperial powers. The birth of Haiti, the first black-led republic, from the ashes of French Saint-Domingue in 1804 was the most significant historical occurrence in this period, but this module offers a wider perspective. It examines how various social groups, most notably free and enslaved people of African descent, sought to survive in and shape the region by drawing on established beliefs, traditions of authority and practices of warfare, as well as by seeking to mobilise, or suppress, new ideas of liberty.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1. Introduction: Empires, plantations and slavery
Week 2. A revolutionary cockpit
Week 3. Old beliefs, new ideas
Week 4. Communications, conspiracies and censorship
Week 5. Labour and liberty
Week 6. Reading week - no seminar
Week 7. Authority and leadership
Week 8. Acts of violence
Week 9. Shifting alliances
Week 10. Conclusions: The conch and the cane

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate detailed knowledge of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Caribbean history, particularly its political, social and military dimensions
• Utilise comparative perspectives on events and processes in different European empires and colonial societies
• Show capacity to engage with relevant contributions made by existing and emergent scholarship
• Demonstrate enhanced study, writing and communication skills, in both written work and group discussion
• Exhibit a capacity for independent study skills, clear/concise expression and critical analysis
• Exhibit improved ability to assess and evaluate historical sources

Indicative reading list

Bessel, Richard, Nicholas Guyatt and Jane Rendall (eds), War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830 (Basingstoke, 2010)
Brown, Christopher Leslie and Philip D. Morgan (eds), Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the modern age (New Haven, 2006)
Buckley, Roger, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795-1815 (London, 1979)
Burnard, Trevor G., and John D. Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia, PA, 2016)
Candlin, Kit, The Last Caribbean frontier, 1795-1815 (Basingstoke, 2012)
Childs, Matt, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006)
Cormack, William, Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1789-1802 (Toronto, 2019)
Craton, Michael, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY, 2009)
Dawson, Kevin, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia, PA, 2018)
Dubois, Laurent and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2017)
Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004)
Duffy, Michael, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France (Oxford, 1987)
Ferrer, Ada, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Fick, Carolyn, The Making of Haiti: The Saint- Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, 1990)
Geggus, David and Norman Fiering, eds, The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009)
Geggus, David, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, IN, 2002)
Geggus, David, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001)
Hazareesingh, Sudhir, Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (London, 2020)
McNeill, John R., Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (Cambridge, 2010)
Mikaberidze, Alexander, The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford, 2020)
Moya Pons, Frank, History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (London, 2007)
Mulich, Jeppe, In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Cambridge, 2020)
Oostindie, Geert, Curacao in the Age of Revolutions, 1795-1800 (Brill, 2011)
Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, ‘Massacre in the Old and New Worlds, c.1780–1820’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15:2 (2013)
Scott, Julius S., The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London, 2018)
Stinchcombe, Arthur L., Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World (Princeton, NJ, 1995)

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes