Scholars who focus on Haiti have a uniform complaint. None of the research designs or theories in the social science disciplines produce the anticipated conclusions. Such problems are not unique to Haiti, but the Haitian experience seems to amplify or exaggerate them. Among Caribbeanists, Haiti is most often thought an exception to any regional generalization. In one way, this has been beneficial, for Haiti has got a great deal of scholarly attention, if often racist in tone or lurid in description. But, in the process, Haiti has been interpreted and studied by non-Haitians for so long that Haitians are presumed to have little or no control of their own destiny.
In this path-breaking assessment, Plummer alerts the reader to the deficiencies of such scholarship and to the efforts by a few Haitian (and non-Haitian) interpreters to correct the scholarly record. Fortunately, she rejects the distortion that sees Haiti only as helpless victim to the imperial powers. By looking beyond Haiti’s political relations with the big powers in this critical era (which have reaffirmed Haitian debility among diplomatic historians) to the intricate social and cultural definition Haiti achieved in the nineteenth century, the author shows that the nation’s elite (which included some non-Haitians) did not supinely acquiesce before the intruder. They had no sympathy with the Haitian masses, of course, and they recognized the limits of their strength in dealing with the Germans, French, British, and especially the North Americans. Under U.S. pressure, they gave in and worked with the occupiers as client governors for 19 years. But throughout they were alert to the powerful, and sometimes violently expressed, determination of Haitians to achieve national identity and, in their struggle, to provide an admirable, if misunderstood, model to modern Third World states.
This is a well-researched and persuasively argued book that will generate long debate. Some of the analysis could have benefited from closer scrutiny of the sources, and an occasional interpretative segment rests more on faith than research, however ample. But no scholarly demurrals can obscure the rewards of a holistic approach to Haitian history, as demonstrated in this first book of a young colleague.
