Seeing Like an Anarchist

IN MEDIA AND popular consciousness, Haiti has become identified with hunger,” Johnhenry Gonzalez observes in Maroon Nation. But in the 19th century, after the revolution that drove out the French slaveowners and before the invasion that brought in a U.S. occupation, the country saw “a free system of decentralized, small-scale agriculture that allowed for unprecedented demographic growth.” In the century that followed Haiti’s 1804 declaration of independence, the country’s population more than quintupled. This, Gonzalez tells us, was “the steepest and largest instance of demographic expansion in Caribbean history” to that point.

This was not because the revolutionary state pursued enlightened policies. Slavery was formally abolished, but forced labor initially continued: Cultivators were still compelled to work the fields, were denied the right to leave without permission, and were legally restrained from choosing their own employers, let alone striking out on their