Layers of Recognition: Haiti and the Atlantic World

Scholars have explained the delayed acceptance of a sovereign and independent Haiti by focusing on the Revolution’s potent challenge to colonialism and slavery. France only recognized Haitian independence in 1825, two decades after the Haitian declaration of independence; Great Britain and the Netherlands implicitly recognized the country only in 1826, and the United States not until 1862. They highlight the fear and racism of the international community that attempted to contain the implications of the world’s only successful slave revolution. The historiography has created a binary of recognition and non-recognition; Haiti’s freedom and independence, this perspective assumes, were so anomalous in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century that it posed a threat that could only be met with full refusal. My paper, however, argues that during the early independence period, full participation was limited, but international governments could in fact imagine a compromise that fell somewhere between recognition and non-recognition.

My research demonstrates that we need to think critically about what we mean by "non-recognition." The case of Haitian independence involved both diplomatic recognition, economic recognition, and temporal conceptions of sovereignty. Foreign merchants and government agents also sustained contact, communication, and exchange, even during this period of "non-recognition." It is these different kinds of recognition that suggest the need to rethink the early independence period in Haiti in terms of  “layers of recognition.”