Revolt Against The Indies Compagny Summary

I attend the talk on “the revolt against the Indies Compagny: Saint-Domingue, 1722-1724” by Malik W. Ghachem. The talk was very informational and interesting. I think that the most valuable thing that I learned from this talk was the extent to which people who partaked in slave trade viewed Monopoly as a threat. Another thing is that this tells us a lot about how much slavery was an economic system. The speaker touched on the commercial interest of slavery, monopoly as a threat to self-determination, the similarities between the tea party uprising and the revolt against the Indies Compagny.

The speaker spoke of the commercial interest of the Indies company which was owned by John Locke at the time of the uprising. Because the Indies company

owned half of Haiti at this time, this means that John Locke who owned the Indies compagny owned that part of Haiti. The part of Haiti was important to slave smuggling and the port. Sante Domingue was an important area because they grew indingo there. Indingo and the cloth from India was used to make luxurious cloths. Thus, owning that part of Sante Domingue meant having monopoly of the ingingo trade.
Thus, the Indies Compagny had monopoly of the indingo trade. In addition, the area that the Indies Compagny owned was important to slave smuggling. John Locke wanted to stop the smuggling of slaves. The Indies Company owning that part of Sante Domingue meant that the profit of the trade smugglers was to be interrupted. For both reasons, there was a revolt against the Indies Compagny because of the fear of monopoly. The ideas behind the American tea party crisis resulted from the fear of monopoly and the definition of monopoly as (the disturbance of self-determination and freedom). The talk spoke to volume about the effects and the motives behind slavery. The history supported the statement that slavery begun to support economic systems of capitalism and monopoly. This makes me wonder whether it was the threat for monopoly or slavery`s as an unmoral institution that angered people to the point where they wanted it to end. An important word that came up in the talk was self-determination. Although, monopoly lead to some being enslaved and thus –lacking self-determination, monopoly also restricted other people who were not necessarily slaves by ending self-determination for them.
The revolt was started by an actress who stormed in the house of Africa in Sante Domingue. This shows that many people and not just people who were involved in the slave trade or the sale of indigo were affected by this monopoly. Even common people within the population opposed this monopoly. Thus, monopoly threatened the self-determination of common of the common people as well.
In relation to the American tea party, I think that this further supports that taxation without representation was a major cause of the Boston tea party.

Although there are other suspected causes of the boston tea party, this seems to be the prevailing narrative. Just like narratives around the boston tea party, there are also narratives around the Haitian revolution. The Haitian revolution is a very meaningful revolution in history because it is the first successful slave revolution in the America. The main narrative is that the revolution happened to end slavery. However, this talk gave me another perspective to consider. The revolt against the indies company was not just a revolt to end the exportation of slaves, but a revolt to prevent the indies company from having a sole company of indigo and other things on the island. The idea that the fear of the restriction and lack of self-determination from slaves and freed people led to the revolution is an idea that I thought was absolutely fascinating. It goes to tell you that freedom can mean many different things. For the slaves, it was literal freedom and the ability to own their own body and not be a property of someone else. For some other people, it was the ability to have their business and not be restricted by a company that takes over the market. In many ways this is very relevant to this day where we see modern day slavery through capitalism, where very few people have the ability to own most of all riches, while enriching themselves off the back of others

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Another thing that this talk made me think of is the many different events and causes that lead up to a revolution. It also makes me think of the meaning of freedom all over different time periods and how it is a little different depending on your social class. However, it all goes back to everyone wanting the ability to own and determine things for themselves without being forced to do something because of the power of someone else.