Labor, Freedom and the end of Slavery in the Saint-Domingue Revolution (1790-1803)

• Grant number: 25/11368-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of America
• Principal Investigator: Rafael de Bivar Marquese
• Grantee: Isabela Rodrigues de Souza
• Supervisor: Alejandro Gomez Pernia
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, France
• Associated to the scholarship: 24/02211-3 - Labor, Freedom and the end of Slavery in the Saint-Domingue Revolution (1790-1803), BP.DR

Abstract

The main objective of this project is to collect essential documentary material for the PhD research. Its objective is to understand the transition from slavery to the peasantry in the former French colony of Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution. The focus is on the confrontation between the revolutionary authorities and the former enslaved population regarding the organization of land and labor after the emancipation of 1793-1794, specifically on the attempt to transform the slaves into wage laborers with the end of the slave regime. It is argued that the violent attempt to introduce wage labor by French and Black leaders was at the heart of the revolutionary conflicts, which involved the very struggle for the practical and ideological definition of what it meant to be free. To this end, three main documentary corpuses produced in the years in question are used: the land and urban censuses of the colony of Saint-Domingue, notarial records, and the collection of the State Secretariat of the Navy. Most of this documentation is found in the Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence and the Archives Nationales in Paris. The internship therefore consists of consulting the archives on site in order to gather the necessary research sources. It is hoped that by cross-referencing these sources, we will be able to understand the contradictory ways in which the revolutionary authorities tried to impose wage-earning on former slaves as equivalent to a new condition of freedom, but also the various ways in which former slaves found to confront this imposition and assert their other vision of being free, which ultimately prevailed with the victory of the Haitian peasantry. (AU)