Reviewed by Ashli White | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4

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Reviewed by Ashli White | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Haitian Revolutionary Studies. By DAVID PATRICK GEGGUS. Blacks in the Diaspora. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 334. $49.95.) Reviewed by Ashli White , Columbia University
The author of almost forty works on the Haitian Revolution and one of the leading scholars of the subject, David Geggus maintains that despite several important studies in recent years, "the most intractable question" remains unanswered: "How are we to imagine the attitudes and beliefs of those Africans and children of Africans of two centuries ago" (p. 42)? The essays in this volume—two new articles along with eleven significantly revised versions of previously published (and sometimes hard-to-find) pieces—address this question by investigating the origins, development, and consequences of the revolution in Saint Domingue for the black and colored populations. The book also aims to challenge the existing scholarship. As Geggus asserts, "too much in the historiography of the Haitian Revolution has gone without critical appraisal," impeding our understanding of "this greatest of all slave revolts" (p. 80). Throughout the collection, Geggus leads by example, scrutinizing previous histories as he creates his own.	1
In his examination of the origins of the revolt, Geggus begins with a consideration of how scholars have accounted for slave rebellions in the Americas. He argues that historians fall, in general, into two camps: they credit ideology (usually republican) or they credit economic factors for creating circumstances that could support armed resistance. Geggus refuses to take a position on either side, pointing out that we know too little about the changes in slave societies—material and ideological—to make meaningful generalizations. In two essays he fills in some of these gaps, by investigating the ideologies that Saint Dominguan slaves fashioned for themselves, most notably those related to vodou religion.	2
Scholars of the Haitian Revolution have lately presented vodou as an antiwhite, revolutionary ideology that inspired the slaves to revolt. Geggus, however, contends that this conclusion is exaggerated and overdrawn; "evidence for this has more often been found in the minds of historians than in the historical record" (p. 91). As a case in point, he looks at the Bois Caïman ceremony, a meeting of slaves in the northern plain in August 1791 that supposedly initiated the rebellion. In contrast to other scholars' claims, Geggus finds that Boukman, the convener of the gathering, was not a religious leader, and neither were any of the other prominent figures of the revolution. In addition, the syncretism of vodou, especially the ways it incorporated elements from white Christianity, could have had a stabilizing rather than a disruptive effect on Saint Dominguan slave society. While Geggus concedes that vodou did galvanize rebel slaves to some extent, it had an ancillary role in the revolution.	. . .

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