The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution - Julius S. Scott
First published in 2018 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
Paperback edition published by Verso in 2020
Forward by Marcus Rediker
ISBN: 978-1-78873-248-2
Two hundred thirty-five years after it began, the ripples of the French Revolution can still be felt to this day. Inspired by the emancipation of the American colonies from the clutches of the British Empire, the French violently dethroned and beheaded their monarchs, establishing a new--if internally divided and unstable--Republic. Under the banner of Liberté, égalité, fraternité (“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”), the French sought to liberate their people from an autocratic and increasingly despotic monarchy and establish democratic rule.
This freedom to rule, however, had its limits in the minds of most Frenchmen. Slavery was an institution deeply vital to the economic prosperity of the colonial powers of Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, and the abolition of the institution would be hotly debated among the landed gentry of both the newly formed Republics of America and France. While these debates raged within the imperial core, whispers of revolution were riding on the winds of the colonies on the periphery. Despite efforts to tamper down the rising tide of revolutionary zeal amongst the colonies, the colonial powers struggled to maintain hegemony over their stolen land, particularly in the Caribbean.
In San Dominique, a slave revolt erupted against French colonial rule in 1791. After much bloodshed and jockeying for power amongst colonial powers, the self-liberated former slaves succeeded in driving out the French, as Napoleon withdrew his forces from the colony in 1803, leading to the creation of the sovereign independent state of Haiti the following year. The revolution rippled through the Atlantic world, as Haiti emerged as the only successful slave rebellion that led to an emancipated state ruled by the formerly enslaved. The fact that former slaves could successfully organize themselves to overthrow their colonial oppressors and rule independently sent tremors of fear through slaveholders across the colonies.
As such, plantation owners and white colonists across the Atlantic attempted to tamp down any form of communication and dissent, fearing that the revolutionary news coming out of France and Haiti would spread like wildfire across the Caribbean. Despite their best efforts, they could not stop the flow of information from reaching the furthest ends of the Caribbean colonies. How did this information travel so quickly and so far in the late 18th century? In his 2018 work, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, American historian Julius S. Scott traces the underground networks of communication that helped to spread revolutionary ideas across the Atlantic World in the wake of the French and Haitian Revolutions.
Overview:
An outgrowth of Scott’s influential, but previously unpublished 1986 doctoral dissertation, The Common Wind meticulously traces the history of tacit and underground communication among slaves, freedmen, sailors, and musicians throughout the Caribbean prior to and following the Haitian Revolution. Scott’s unpublished dissertation has long been influential within the academic world, becoming a widely cited source in scholarly publications. Due to Scott’s insistence on minimal revisions and his ill health, the work struggled to find a suitable publisher. In 2018, Verso agreed to publish it with minimal revisions, bringing Scott’s analysis of informal communication networks in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions to a much wider audience.
In this groundbreaking historical work, Scott explores the underground transatlantic networks of communication that were utilized to spread revolutionary ideas across the Caribbean leading up to the Haitian Revolution. Scott urges the reader not to think of the Haitian Revolution as an isolated event, but rather deeply connected to the broader network of revolutionary currents that swept across the Americas during the Age of Revolution. These revolutionary ideas were borne out of various slave revolts and the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions and were carried along by an invisible, yet powerful “common wind” of information, rumors, and ideas spread by enslaved Africans, sailors, musicians, and other transient groups across the Caribbean.
During the 18th century, the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was of vital importance to the economy of Europe, producing roughly half of the coffee and sugarcane imported into Europe. While this turned “the pearl of the Antilles” into an economic powerhouse, the wealth that was generated was built on the foundation of unpaid slave labor. Thus, commerce and trade were critical in building the wealth of the imperial powers.
This circulation of trade, however, also entailed the spreading of more than just goods. In addition, information and rumors also circulated through these routes, much to the chagrin of the colonial powers. Scott illustrates that the economic exploitation of the colonies contained within it the seeds of its own destruction, as rumors of revolution traveled upon the wind and waters of local trade routes. Vastly outnumbered and terrified of the possibility of rebellion on the plantations, the slave-owning elites attempted to quell dissent and prevent communication between slave populations. Even after Haiti gained independence after their successful revolution in 1804, colonial powers coordinated “to limit Saint-Domingue’s contacts with the rest of the Americas by denying the black rebels access to the sea” (202), effectively quarantining the island from spreading emancipatory ideas while also crippling their economy.
Colonists feared that the enslaved laborers they depended upon would secretly plot to overthrow them. Despite their best efforts, the elite classes could not fully stop these routes of communication, as it would also cut off the trade necessary for their exorbitant wealth. Rumors and news of the possible abolition of slavery in Britain and revolution in France traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, as abolitionist pamphlets and other written material made their way to plantations that dotted the Caribbean.
This information flowed primarily through rebellious sailors, free rebels known as “maroons,” runaway slaves that boarded trading ships and evaded capture in the larger colonial cities, and refugees from the American and French Revolutions. News and information often spread rapidly through these clandestine networks, as enslaved laborers and free people of color were usually more well-informed than the plantation owners. Scott highlights the importance of the urban population and the mobility of trade and peoples as key factors in the rapid dissemination of information across the Atlantic, despite the colonial officials’ attempts to quell these revolutionary ideas. As such, Scott argues, the economic and social networks that were established by the oppressive and brutal exploitation of slave labor in the Caribbean formed the conditions of its own undoing.
Commendations:
Scott's account has many notable strengths. First and foremost, this volume is a painstaking reconstruction of rumors, secret communications, and how they served to spread the word of revolution following the French and Haitian Revolutions. As a historian, I also deeply appreciate how difficult of an undertaking Scott endured, especially since most surviving official sources would not have mentioned the daily lives of slaves and sailors, let alone their clandestine communications. In order to trace these social networks, Scott utilizes a wide breadth of resources to reconstruct these channels of communication, including parliamentary debates, commercial trade records, travel writings of sailors, local newspapers, private papers of plantation owners, and many more primary and secondary sources.
In the course of writing this dissertation, Scott traveled to a litany of international libraries and archives, including the National Library of Jamaica, The National Archives in London, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the University of Virginia Library, and Bibliothèque des Frères in Haiti, to name only a few. Scott brilliantly reads through and even against these sources, looking for the gaps and silences hidden in the historical record in order to build his case. By doing so, he offers historians and scholars new and innovative ways of gathering and reading historical sources, and how we can highlight and begin to uncover the narratives of previously invisible subjects. The Common Wind is a preeminent example of social history, or history from below, as Scott reclaims the voices that have historically been silenced and marginalized.
Furthermore, it is difficult to understate how influential and important Scott’s work was to a long line of scholars who came after him. While not officially published as a book until 2018, Scott’s dissertation has been passed around the halls of academia for decades, shaping how we think about the history of the Atlantic and the development of the discipline of social history, especially in relation to the Caribbean. Rather than merely recounting the movement of goods or people during the late 18th century, Scott reconstructs the movement of radical ideas that spread alongside these merchant vessels. Along with other scholars and works such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Scott’s scholarship recenters the Haitian Revolution as a pivotal moment in the history of antislavery movements across the Atlantic.
In addition to its academic rigor, The Common Wind is a compelling narrative that centers on the autonomy and agency of enslaved populations to undermine the brutal conditions under which they lived. While his original audience was largely academic, Scott rarely employed complex theoretical language or jargon, choosing instead to use vivid imagery and extended metaphors to paint the emotive context in which these historical subjects operated. Whether recounting the shock that elites had when they discovered they were the last to know about events across the sea, describing the exploits of escaped army musicians who continually disguised themselves to evade capture, or telling the stories of sailors and buccaneers who bucked against the colonial authorities, Scott’s storytelling abilities brilliantly shine through this work, making it immensely accessible to the average reader.
One of Scott’s strongest aspects in this work is his ability to deconstruct the anatomy of revolutions and liberation struggles. The Haitian Revolution could not simply be contained within its national borders. Rather, it became a symbol of abolition across the Atlantic, as the common wind of emancipation blew in all directions. Scott’s great ability in this work is to accomplish two tasks simultaneously: to pay close attention to the particularities of a specific geographic and historical moment while also recognizing the universal current that motivated the revolutionaries and spread it across a wide range of contexts. What began as a movement for emancipation within a colonized nation transcended its own particularities and spread to become an international movement.
Urban spaces take a prominent place within the propagation of rebellion, as Scott argues that Caribbean cities allowed for a more fluid environment that facilitated the uncontrollable exchange of ideas. The networks established by commerce and trade also allowed for subversive communication networks to form under the noses of the colonial ruling class. Port cities were a locus for people seeking independence, and attracted a wide range of people from across the world. Free blacks, sailors/pirates, and Irish refugees often forged bonds and confided in one another, finding commonality in their struggles against colonial powers. Those who could speak multiple languages were also adept at translating revolutionary ideas across language barriers, uniting oppressed peoples across national borders. The beginning seeds of urbanization in the late 18th century began to sprout a new political consciousness that applied the Enlightenment ideas of equality and liberty to enslaved populations. This solidarity across national and racial lines that were rooted in class relations is a key component of successful revolutions, which serve as an important lesson for our contemporary context as well.
Finally, what I find most personally interesting in Scott’s account is how the common wind of revolutionary fervor served as a way to expose the contradiction within a colonial system predicated on slave labor. The economic wealth of the colonies was dependent on slave labor and interconnected trade routes between the imperial core and the periphery of empire. On their own, the colonies could not sustain themselves economically, despite the vast amount of sugarcane that was exported. In order to be profitable, these colonies had to either trade with their “mother country” or trade across international boundaries. This trade and mobility led to the development of port towns, which while facilitating greater exchanges of free trade, also accelerated the free flow of information and ideas across national borders. Formerly enslaved men and women, abolitionists, and rebellious sailors would communicate and correspond with one another, spreading anticolonial ideas and news of the successful rebellion in Haiti. These ideas, the people who spread them, and the routes they needed to spread them, served to undermine the legitimacy of the plantation economy.
In this example, we see a salient example of the Hegelian concept of “dialectical reversal.” Essentially, this means that every idea contains within it its own opposition, as contradiction is an ontological reality hard-baked into the fabric of reality, rather than merely epistemological. It is also a fantastic example of uncovering the universal within the particular, as these revolutionary ideas transcended the events of the Haitian Revolution and trickled throughout the rest of the Atlantic world. Despite the best efforts of the colonial powers to quell this revolutionary fervor (and their success in achieving economic hegemony and crippling the Haitian economy and contributing to its underdevelopment), the actions of poor plantation workers, slaves, and other landless peoples used their mobility to spread emancipatory ideas across the Atlantic, challenging the dominant powers, and urging others to work in solidarity with them to fight for abolition.
Critique:
On the other hand, The Common Wind suffers from a few weaknesses. First of all, since it is largely an academic dissertation, the book can be quite repetitive at points, and extremely dry in sections. While the research is incredibly detailed, the average reader can get easily lost amidst the lists of names, places, and numbers of ships/slaves/cargo/exports/etc. Despite it largely being free from academic jargon, the book can occasionally fall into the trap of endlessly listing facts and statistics without much rhetorical or narrative flair. This overwhelming barrage of details and statistical data without much contextual background can easily turn off all but the most motivated of readers and make any lasting takeaways difficult to remember.
As such, while Scott’s central thesis is fascinating, some of the chapters are somewhat weak in their argumentation, often bouncing around from topic to topic without a cohesive center to hold them all together. Since it was published with minimal revisions, there are several aspects of the work that are outdated or unresponsive to current scholarship on the Black Atlantic. It could also have included images, maps, detailed biographical information, or other visual information to breathe more life into the dearth of statistics that populate this book. While I completely understand the value of publishing the dissertation close to its original form, it could have also been polished a bit more to smooth out these rougher patches and create a much tighter argument. Granted, this lack of updates is primarily due to Scott’s fervid insistence that it not be edited, so in the end, we must be content that it has been published at all.
Finally, the reader might be disappointed that there is little information regarding the events of the Haitian Revolution in Scott’s account. The Revolution hangs over the book like an indescribable Event, as the bulk of the book concerns the social, economic, and political context both before and after the events in San Dominique. The book jumps back and forth chronologically, so unless the reader is familiar with the colonial landscape of the Caribbean and has a general knowledge of the events leading up to the Haitian Revolution, then they will have a difficult time keeping track of the timeline of events. As such, due to its density, I would recommend reading this book alongside James’s The Black Jacobins or perhaps watching a documentary of the Haitian Revolution to obtain some background information.
Conclusion:
Overall, The Common Wind is a meticulously detailed and influential work that has dramatically shaped our understanding of not only the Haitian Revolution but the rest of the Black Atlantic during the late 18th century. While it can be overly heavy-handed in its use of statistical data and is dense in places, Scott’s account highlights the vital importance of communication networks to spread revolutionary ideas across national borders. Scott provides a deeper understanding of the hidden connections between enslaved people throughout the Caribbean and how they worked together with sailors, military deserters, and other rebellious individuals to resist the brutal conditions of colonialism.
Despite the imperial powers’s attempts to quell and silence dissent, the very conditions that built their enormous wealth were brilliantly exploited by the marginalized populations of the Caribbean, as they utilized common urban spaces to spread ideas of black emancipation. Scott has brilliantly stitched together a wonderful tapestry woven from disparate archival collections to show us how Afro-Caribbean laborers utilized the tools of empire to undermine it from within. While it might not be the first book to read for information regarding the Haitian Revolution, for those who are interested in how Afro-Americans were active participants who fought for their own emancipation in the late 18th century, Scott’s innovative and highly influential work is an indispensable addition to your anti-colonial collection.