Haitian landowning Blacks turned to noiriste nationalism to contest mulatto state control.

Evidence

Such was also the case in the Caribbean and in America (where the emergence of a middle class among Blacks could easily be traced back to the eighteenth century). Even in independent Haiti, where the Black and mulatto revolutionary armies had, by the beginnings of the nineteenth century, broken down into racial and class factions, a petit bourgeois nationalism found expression. The sugar-export sector of the Haitian economy had been destroyed during the revolutionary wars and subsequently was unable to compete with Cuban and Indian exports in the world system. And though a series of political eruptions from below had divided the land between large landowners (Black and mulatto) and peasants, the majority of the peasants were landless and frequently rebellious. Commercial pursuits and control of the administration of the state had increasingly become the arenas contended for by the Black and mulatto groups within the ruling class. But in this conflict, Alex Dupuy asserts, “the largely landowning black faction and its allies, frustrated by the mulattoes in their attempt to control the state, had recourse to a noiriste or black nationalist ideology, claiming to be the sole representatives of the people because of their common skin colour.” Inevitably, during the second half of the century, a radical Black ideology was articulated by renegades among the Black petit bourgeois intelligentsia. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 860

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter material on Haiti’s revolution and the racial-class factionalism origins of the Black radical tradition.

Related

• Haitian noiriste nationalism arose when mulatto state-control blocked the Black landed faction (similarity 0.93)
• Multiple internal and external factors blocked capitalist transformation of Haiti (similarity 0.81)
• Post-Reconstruction Black elites adopted chauvinist, authoritarian ideology to seek race power. (similarity 0.80)
• Anticolonial struggles birthed a Black radical intelligentsia that critiqued and relocated socialist theory (similarity 0.79)
• Mass Black migrations broke middle-class leadership and spawned class renegade radicals. (similarity 0.79)
• Haitian slaves transformed themselves into organized armies under radical leadership. (similarity 0.79)
• The African-born majority of Haitian slaves shaped the coming revolution (similarity 0.79)
• Haitian slaves were not a Marxian proletariat yet shared its historical formation (similarity 0.79)
• The Black radical tradition abandons Western ideologies for its own independent authority. (similarity 0.78)
• Haitian independence inspired slave revolts and black consciousness across the Americas. (similarity 0.78)
• The Black bourgeoisie’s class interests diverged from Black labor during Reconstruction (similarity 0.78)
• Contemporary slaves understood Haiti’s revolution better than later historians would. (similarity 0.78)
• Black revolutionary theory emerged independently from European radical movements (similarity 0.78)