Charlton W. Yingling's monograph tells how the Age of Revolutions shaped the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (today, the Dominican Republic) and its neighbor, the French colony of Saint-Domingue (the soon-to-form country of Haiti). The Haitian Revolution spilled out onto the Spanish colony and there stirred up currents that decisively directed the fate of both sides of the island.
Today, scholarship on the Dominican Republic emphasizes the shared history of both sides of the island. This perspective first surfaced in histories of the unification of the island (1822–44), and it gave teeth to a new wave of scholarship confronting the myths of a post–Rafael Trujillo (white and separate) Dominican Republic. The people of the island “dreamed together” to abolish slavery, to expel colonial powers, and to carve out new economic opportunities across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this scholarship tells us. Yingling's book offers a revolutionary-era genealogy for Haitian-Dominican collaboration....
