Maroon Nation

Reviewed by: Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti by Johnhenry Gonzalez Westenley Alcenat Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti. By Johnhenry Gonzalez. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. 316 pages. Cloth, ebook. The story of the Haitian Revolution has been told many times: In August 1791, plantation workers in the French colony of Saint Domingue overthrew slaveholders and ignited the Haitian Revolution. When independence was declared in January 1804, the revolutionaries set out to reestablish Haiti—once the world's most productive slave society—as a utopian community of Black republicans. Johnhenry Gonzalez views this narrative, which is embraced by many scholars, as romanticizing the historical pathology of slave uprisings by focusing on their immediate effects rather than their long-term trajectory. In his Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti, Gonzalez rejects the myopia of that narrative and its bottom-up account of progress from enslavement to republican governance. Though most scholars of the revolution close their narratives shortly after independence, Gonzalez instead traces the continuing conflicts and developments in Haiti over the subsequent five decades. He believes the events of this half century complicate any simple celebratory story and reveals Haiti's distinctive dynamic of enduring conflict and struggle. The course of Haiti's political history during this period, Gonzalez argues, is best captured by what he calls the maroon nation thesis: Haiti's rural and localized cultural autonomy and economic autarky developed a political economy characteristic of a counter-plantation and anti-institutional society that rejected all "labor systems that were reminiscent of slavery" (8). This thesis both accounts for the radical hopes of postindependence Haiti and also explains how in ensuing decades that promise yielded to social and political turmoil, which was especially pronounced in conflicts between the political and economic elites and the rural population of marooned peasants. Gonzalez sees marronage politics as driving the cultural dynamic of postrevolutionary Haiti—"the guiding principle that characterized the struggles, outlook, and economic achievements of the early Haitians" (3). Following the example of Sidney W. Mintz, Gonzalez deploys this concept to capture "the postemancipation phenomenon of a 'runaway peasantry'" (10).1 But he also argues that marronage politics was not characteristic only of Haiti's peasantry. Instead, he insists that it also shaped Haiti's new elite, [End Page 326] a class of men and women that included the formerly enslaved, who similarly turned toward self-sufficiency and away from the Atlantic world as the foundation of their politics. It also underlays the tendency of the elite to resist institutional continuity and political compromise. As a result, for Gonzalez, marronage highlights the "particular history of irregular class conflict and social division [that] created counterinstitutional practices among both the masses and the elite" (33). Gonzalez, moreover, uses the universal maroon character to explain successive political conflicts in Haiti as the result of continuous marronage warfare—internal sectional revolts that continued to regulate class relations, not unlike the master-slave struggles of the colonial regimes. This "maroon phenomenon" (12) gave Haiti's politics a deeply centripetal and counterinstitutional nature, in which Haitian society was undermined by "an especially stark form of class division and a discordant pattern of endemic social impasse" (34). The book provides one of the most updated and coherent syntheses of early Haitian political economy in the nineteenth century. Haiti was a nation that was conscious of its identity as a "fundamental alternative to bondage and servitude" (166). This consciousness, Gonzalez argues, reflected "the popular conception that all forms of plantation work and hired labor were equivalent to slavery" (167). This stance had been a fundamental cause of the revolution: as he puts it, "Haiti did not become a nation of small farmers because the plantation system fell. The plantation system fell because a large percentage of the early Haitians resolved to become small farmers" (16). Similarly, after the revolution, he notes, Haitians reformulated "their relationship with both the world capitalist market and the landscape and ecology of Hispaniola" (15). Postrevolutionary Haitians created an economy largely apart from the Atlantic foreign trade, with a "widespread preference for systems of mixed subsistence production" crystallized into a "strategic rural autarky

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