Essai de géographie historique de la Caraïbe révolutionnaire (fin XVIIIe s.-ca. 1820)

• Main Author: Nicolas Terrien
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2019-12-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: Caribbean; geography; sovereignty; revolution; independence; Amerindians
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/78317

The cartographic representations commonly offered of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries Caribbean by historians and contemporaries alike do not reflect its complexity or dynamics. They reflect far more European Powers’ aspirations in America than the reality of the multiple sovereignties, particularly Amerindian, that exercised there – or the very absence of sovereignty. The revolutions of that period and the concomitant dissolution of Spanish and French imperial sovereignties in the Caribbean amplified the range and volume of the fraudulent trans-imperial maritime circulations which, already endemic in the 18th century, had long thwarted the colonial states' claims to any monopoly. The study of these circulations at the turn of the 19th century reveals an alternative geography of the Caribbean, composed of an archipelago of sovereignties underpinned by a maritime framework, the interloping Caribbean. This geography did not evade the supporters of the new sovereignties in America – the United States, Haiti and the independent governments of Spanish America – who were the product of this as much as they benefited from it; upon it then arose, around Saint-Domingue, the revolutionary Caribbean.