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H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-Atlantic@msu.edu (April, 2002) Mimi Sheller. _Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica_. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001. 270pp. Index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8130-1883-8. Reviewed for H-Atlantic by Stewart King, Mount Angel Seminary Historians over the two centuries since Haiti's independence have tended to portray the country as unique. Because it was the "first black republic," it has been depicted as somehow special or different--different in a negative way in the discourse of racist exclusion that dominated western intellectual reactions to the non-western world until the last few generations, and then different in a positive way to more progressive scholars. Haitian scholars liked to think of their country as different from the others, too. From Thomas Madiou to the present day, Haitian particularism has been the dominant theme in Haitians' view of themselves. Mimi Sheller has done historians of Haiti a favor by drawing the parallel between political developments there and in Jamaica in the decades after the end of slavery. The book even considers the possibility of a direct link between Haitian and Jamaican politics by investigating charges made at the time by elite opponents of the Morant Bay movement. The Jamaican leadership charged that Haitian agents had encouraged and supported the Morant Bay rebels, who were seeking to create a larger black state in the Caribbean. The "Haytian fear" allegations make an interesting but ultimately unconvincing argument for the existence of region-wide collective action by black peasants during the 19th century. Moreover, Dr. Sheller has given us a very useful analysis of the development of peasant agency in post-abolition societies in the Caribbean. Marxist and developmentalist schools of thought both stressed the _lumpen_ nature of the peasantry. Peasants were incapable of organization or progressive political opinions of their own, and could only act in the political sphere as the clients of political elites, or, at the very most, in defense of traditional rights and social structures. Politics in former slave societies could only follow the pattern of the other Latin American republics, where _caudillos_ and urban elites competed for the support of the masses through patronage networks and fought each other on basically personalist grounds for the fruits of political power. _Democracy After Slavery_ rebuts these common assumptions by tracking the formation of peasant agency in Haiti and Jamaica after the end of slavery in those places. Dr. Sheller does not attempt to gloss over the very real differences between the two islands, the one an independent former French colony and the other a British colony. She points out, however, that the similarities in their economic situations, as places once at the core of the sugar and coffee plantation complex, and the frequent interactions between them, overshadow their differences and make comparison fruitful. And fruitful it is. The Haitian Liberal Rebellion and the associated Piquet movement of peasants in the southern peninsula bears comparison with the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica. The book demonstrates the formation of public opinion through newspapers and elite reaction through police and court records and public correspondence. Dr. Sheller has clearly done an impressive amount of research in a wide variety of archives and brings many different perspectives to bear on this subject. Bearing all this in mind, I have to say that _Democracy After Slavery_ is not an easy read. It is clearly a dissertation re-worked, lightly, for publication. Theoretical concepts, expressed in language that is sometimes a little dense, come thick and fast. The most serious flaw is that there are few real human beings to identify with. This is especially true of the Haitian portion of the book, where the sources are a little less rich than for the Jamaican section. Obviously, the author cannot go beyond what her sources allow. Moreover, she clearly sees social groups instead of individuals as the important actors in history. However, the non-specialist reader would benefit from seeing how the broad social forces that Dr. Sheller talks about affected the lives of specific individuals. On balance, though, this is a very good book. I would encourage readers of H-Caribbean to read it. Anyone who wants a broader view of how the peasant societies of the twentieth-century Caribbean evolved out of the plantation societies of the eighteenth should read what Dr. Sheller has to say. Copyright 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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