The Haitians: A Decolonial History by Jean Casimir

Author:Jean Casimir [Casimir, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469651545
Google: _1GCzQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-11-15T23:54:35.057262+00:00

The Itinerary of Colonial Property

When we overlook the historical circumstances that led to the implantation or the insertion of a national state in an exploitation colony, we constrain our ability to find a logic in the structures of power and the actions of this state. In Haiti, the normative principles and ideological orientation of governing institutions and public administration were an extension of those of the French state. But in Saint-Domingue, the metropolitan state installed only a colonial administration, which obviously was incapable of endowing a state of law with key principles. The relationship that united France and its colony was shaped by the racialization of human relationships, and that constant in the history of Haiti blocks all progress toward the establishment of a state of law—that is to say, a state where the law reflects rights. In consequence, in its administrative aspects of governance the national state in Haiti was an extension of the French colonial administration and not the state of law in France.

The colonial administration’s starting point was the same, as P. Petit perceived in his 1771 treatise Droit public ou gouvernement des colonies françaises: “In the beginning the authority, the law, and the defense in the colony were confided in the property owners. In 1664, Colbert put them in the hands of the Company of the West Indies, still the owner of the islands. The councilors chose a few from among the property owners who acted in fact as lords of the islands” (Petit 1771, 66).

So the islands were put in the power of suzerains: France appropriated a territory with the goal of producing valuable agricultural goods with a labor force that was, primordially, destined to satisfy the needs of the metropolitan state and only superficially, local needs. Later, with the transformation of Saint-Domingue into Haiti, the signatories of the Declaration of Independence didn’t question the implications of the right to conquest for the control of landed property, the management of the labor force, or the choice of leaders. That which was negotiated in metropolitan France through a voting system based on tax qualifications was, in the colony, a demarcation line between those who governed and those who were governed. Popular sovereignty was distanced in this way from the political structure of Haiti.

The nineteenth-century oligarchs began this period with the prideful satisfaction of having defeated Napoléon’s army, the most powerful of the day, and therefore of having conquered the ownership and the management of the richest of colonies. From then on, they seemed satisfied to define sovereignty through their relationship with external powers and not in relation to the totality of the nation, on which they always turned their back. In doing so, they failed to realize that they were situated at the margins of the essential global transformations and were becoming incapable of participating in them as autonomous actors. In effect, their refusal of any limitations that might have been placed on the way landowners managed their labor force and chose the country’s leaders was

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