We Dream Together: Mid-Century Anticolonial Movements and Shifting Axes of Caribbean Solidarity, 1822–74

At the petition of a number of easterners, Haitian officials entered the central-valley Dominican town of Santiago de los Caballeros in early 1822, declaring the whole island united under one government.  The indivisibility of the island, constitution writers argued, reflected both pragmatic concerns of regional security and an extension of black citizenship across the whole of the territory, in a hostile and thoroughly colonial international setting. As the experiment crumbled nearly two decades later, the salience of these alliances did not perish.  Revived and invigorated in anticolonial struggles in the east in the 1860s, their extension once again grew to be pan-Caribbean in scope.  Plans for Antillean federation, mobilized in a number of activist networks, plotted alliances across colonial and geographic lines.

This paper scrutinizes the gap in our historiographical imagination between the anti-imperial foment of the Age of Revolutions in the nineteenth century and an age of international Caribbean activism in the twentieth. Durable, these regional imaginations accelerated in 1850s and 1860s, fed by the threat of encroaching capital, shifting labor modes, and new technologies.  The paper explores the logic, extension, and shifting bases of these solidarities, the pragmatic alliances and anticolonial struggles they fomented, as well as the limits of solidarity implicit in their iteration. Often fractured from or in opposition to local island governance, these philosophical traditions are at the margins of nationalist rememberings of the era. The scope of their imagination is imbricated, however, in an ambition for alternative economic and political futures of a sovereign Caribbean, ideas that flourished in federalist movements of the twentieth century and beyond.