Haiti’s Revolution

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pooja Bhatia talks to Thomas Jones about the Haitian revolution of 1791, the world-historical debut of the movement for Black liberation. They discuss the early insurrections, the leadership of Toussaint Louverture and his complicated legacy, the post-revolutionary land reforms and their traces in modern Haiti’s mango industry, and how Bhatia managed to get an interview with former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide after his return from exile. Find more by Pooja Bhatia on Haiti in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/haitirevolutionpod Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you enjoy listening to the LRB podcast, then you'll probably enjoy reading the LRB.
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0:30.3	Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones and today I'm speaking with Pugabatia who has a piece in the latest issue of the LRB on the Haitian Revolution
0:34.7	when the movement for Black liberation made its world historical
0:38.1	debut. It's a review of three books, The Common Wind, Afro-American Currents in the Age of the
0:43.5	Haitian Revolution by Julius Scott, Maroon Nation, a history of revolutionary Haiti by John Henry
0:48.8	Gonzalez, and Black Spartacus, the epic life of Tucson Louvett by Sudhir Hazari Singh. Hello, Pugia, and
0:55.6	thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. So maybe to begin, you could tell the story of
1:01.7	what happened in August 1791. Yeah, there had been slave insurrections throughout what was then called Sandoming, because it was a
1:13.3	French colony. And there had been slave insurrections before that moment. And they were usually
1:19.6	quashed pretty quickly. But in the years leading up to 1791, basically, they were gaining,
1:30.8	they were gaining force. Part of that has to do with the fact that the french revolution which started in 1789 sort of opened up this kind of chasm between
1:39.3	what the french were saying about enlightenment ideals and what was going on in Sandoming, which was
1:47.5	that, you know, slaves were, it was basically one of the most extremely brutal versions of
1:53.6	slavery or black slavery in the world. So, you know, life expectancy on the plantations was something
2:00.6	like 37 years. And the death rate was, you know, five or six percent. Basically, it became, it became for a lot of slavers. It became cheaper to import new slaves, new labor from Africa than it was to keep their existing slaves alive.
2:21.7	So you have to, there's like this sort of backdrop of alarming conditions in which people who
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