Hating Empire Properly by Sunil M. Agnani

Author:Sunil M. Agnani [Agnani, Sunil M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780823251810
Google: HlxFAQAACAAJ
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2013-01-15T16:04:41+00:00

Hispaniola, or the Rights of Man in the Colonies

An insurrection of slaves in St. Domingue took place in August 1791; months before this, in April, Burke found an occasion in Parliament to make reference to events developing on the island of Hispaniola. However, his discussion of St. Domingue is made in the service of winning another argument. The events there provide the resonating knell for Burke’s alarmist clanging against the spread of Jacobinism to Quebec. The issue to be discussed in the House on April 21, 1791, was the Quebec Bill, but it became entangled in a dispute that Burke was having with Charles James Fox, who disagreed with the position Burke had taken on the French Revolution in the Reflections, published only six months earlier. A week earlier, on April 15, Fox had praised the new constitution of France as “the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty, which had been erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country.”14 This constitution would itself be scrapped by the revolutionaries a year later, in 1792, but Fox maintained his approval of the revolution perhaps to provoke a rift with Burke in the Whig Party. When the opportunity arose to speak on the Quebec Bill, Burke used it as an occasion to return discussion to his position on the French Revolution “on the rather tenuous pretext that Quebec, being a French-speaking province, might conceivably be offered the new French Constitution.”15 Fox’s admiration of the French constitution did not receive a proper reply from Burke until on May 6, 1791, when the House resumed consideration of the Quebec Bill. The passage below illustrates the confluence of several characteristics of Jacobinism in Burke’s thought, distilled (if I may be permitted a pharmacological expression myself) to a symbolically rich alembic. I cite the passage at length because there is much I wish to comment upon within it:

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