Calyx Palmer, “The empire of liberty”: Haitian Independence and the Problem of Empire

Martin Pugh, 'A splendid weapon to those who dispute our motives in the ex-imperial world': Britain's response to the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution

Commentator: Professor Max Edling.

Abstracts:

“The empire of liberty”: Haitian Independence and the Problem of Empire

While the Haitian Revolution began as a slave uprising within the French colony of Saint-Domingue, it ended with the creation of the independent nation state of Haiti. Independence from France had by no means been the initial intention of the uprising, but despite having gained French citizenship in 1793, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the arrest of Toussaint Louverture had irreparably damaged trust in France. Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ Declaration of Independence in 1804 had definitively broken with France, repudiating every aspect of French colonial legacy within the new nation. Despite this rejection of empire, in 1805 the very first article of the first Haitian Constitution officially declared the new nation to be “the empire of Haïti”. While the French Empire was barbarous and cruel, Haiti’s new aim was to create and maintain “the empire of liberty” in their independence.

'A splendid weapon to those who dispute our motives in the ex-imperial world': Britain's response to the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution

This paper examines British responses to the January 1964 revolution in newly-independent Zanzibar, when East and West alike came to see the former British colony as a potential ‘African Cuba’, a bridgehead to communist infiltration of the wider continent. By viewing British policy towards Zanzibar through a Commonwealth as well as a Cold War lens, it advances new arguments regarding Britain’s delay in granting diplomatic recognition to the revolutionary regime and Britain’s contingency plans for military intervention in the archipelago. The ways in which Zanzibari and Tanganyikan leaders perceived British motives are also examined, helping explain Zanzibar’s break with the West, its turn to the East, and its merger with neighbouring Tanganyika.