Class Conflict and Diplomacy: Haitian Isolation in the 19th-Century World System

Abstract

The article argues that Haiti's diplomatic isolation after its revolution and independence was due to two different processes, its place in the symbolic system of domestic politics in the United States, and its place in the lives and experience of people intensely concerned with Haiti in France, Britain, and Spain. The result was that the diplomatic isolation was ended first in the 1830s by Europe, by the countries materially damaged by the Hatian Revolution. It was ended later by the United States and its Spanish-American client states, who were only symbolically damaged by Haiti as an antislavery black power symbol after the Emancipation Proclamation in the 1860s. A theory of the politics of diplomacy with two parts, the role of a foreign country as a symbol in the domestic politics of other countries, and the role of people with extensive contact and interest in particular parts of another country in the diplomatic milieux of other countries, is developed to explain this case.

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