In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir
argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image
of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century.
Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from
Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a
sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical
rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S.
occupation in 1915.
The Haitians
also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism,
and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's
moun andeyo—the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking
how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in
the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir
identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from
Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation
encompassed consistent reliance on small-scale landholding. Casimir
shows how lakou, small plots of land often inhabited by
generations of the same family, were and continue to be sites of
resistance even in the face of structural disadvantages originating
in colonial times, some of which continue to be maintained by the
Haitian government with support from outside powers.