28 - The Unruly Caribbean: Reverberations of Saint-Domingue’s Rebellions on the Caribbean Coast of New Granada and Venezuela, 1790–1800

Summary

Focusing on a comparative study of diverse socio-political movements and rebellions that developed in the Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela during the last decade of the eighteenth century, this chapter will analyze the complex and distinctive reverberations of Saint Domingue’s rebellion in the Spanish American mainland. The vast and exposed Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela with its vibrant port cities and coastal towns allowed for the emergence of multicultural and multilingual hubs for Atlantic encounters and exchange. The open, varied, and dynamic configuration of port societies facilitated the flow of information about the Atlantic Revolutions, but especially about the Haitian Revolution. Of the three Atlantic Revolutions—the American, the French, and the Haitian—the Haitian one became the most tangible for the inhabitants of coastal Venezuela and New Granada, who used the impressions of the turbulent Caribbean insurgency as shared knowledge, an everyday reference point that was exploited by insurgents during negotiations with the colonial state and, at the same time, by those very elites and state agents to justify repression or, alternatively, to make concessions to “calm the spirits” of rebellion in the region.