Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution

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0:00Patrick Jean-Baptiste So it really is an honor to have you on, Professor Garfield. So I appreciate you coming here. Yeah, two years in the making. See, I never gave up, you know, I was like, I gotta have it all because I keep running into you in the damn footnotes, you know?

0:13Julia Gaffield Footnotes are the best place to look in most books. It is, isn't it? Right. And I think like one of the greatest compliments about a book is like you recommend the book and you're like, and don't skip the footnotes.

0:30Patrick Jean-Baptiste Before we get into Haitian connections and the Atlantic world recognition after revolution, you're writing a book, a biography of Dissaline. I am. It's true. Oh my God. You know, I, I, I, I, you know, Dissaline, where are you in this process? Are you almost done?

0:49Julia Gaffield That is, that is the million dollar question, isn't it? Am I almost done? At this point, um, it is out for its second round of peer review. Those reports are coming back any day now, fingers crossed. And, um, so we'll see what the reviewers say, um, how much more editing needs to be done. Kind of publication date is going to depend on, on that, that work, but it'll be either late 2024, early 2025. There's a full version of it and it's, you know, uh, a decent full version of it. Um, but there's still a little bit of work to do.

1:25Patrick Jean-Baptiste But lengthwise, what are we looking at here?

1:28Julia Gaffield Lengthwise, uh,

1:29Patrick Jean-Baptiste 300, under 300, 400 pages.

1:32Julia Gaffield Oh, I don't know how it translates into pages. 150,000, 100,000 words. Oh, okay.

1:37Patrick Jean-Baptiste Okay.

1:38Julia Gaffield Which I think should be longer than Haitian connections by about half, like, uh, yeah, one and a half times that. So it, it's, it's not a short biography. Why Haitian? Initially a case of, I had a really great professor in undergrad, Melanie Newton at the University of Toronto. And I was sitting in her class and it was, it was the first time I had learned, it was a kind of general intro to Caribbean history class. And it was the first time I was learning a lot about a lot of this material. That semester, I very distinctly remember, like, at the start of the class, I was one of the students who sat at the back of the room. And by the end of the class, this was, um, a full year class. It was two semesters. They do this in, in Canada a fair amount. And by the end of the class, I was sitting in the front row of the class. I think that kind of physical progression just matched my interest in the material. And it was in this class that I first read an excerpt from the Black Jacobins. It was basically, I was reading about this and I was, I was just kind of blown away. I had never learned anything about the Haitian revolution before this class. The, the story of it and a broader impact, it really blew my mind. And that was also the same year, this was in 2004. And so there was a lot of talk about Haiti in the news and Professor Newton ensured that we kind of connected what we were learning about in the class to contemporary events through discussions in the class, but also outside the class with community members, discussions about Haitian sovereignty and kind of connecting history to the present. And this was the first time I'd really seen that done. And I, I kind of never looked back. So it was just, it was a really good class in undergrad, a really great professor at a very specific moment in time. And the way, the way Professor Newton taught the class, it was kind of heavily dependent on essay writing that I, that it turns out I actually love. And I didn't really know that until that class. And so it was just the, the, and then of course, after that, I took every single class that Professor Newton offered. And I just tagged along after her and followed her around. And it's, it's been nice kind of bumping into her at various academic events. Now she very much remembers me being in the class. And I, you know, I'm like, basically you changed my life. That's awesome. It was such a great experience. Yeah.

4:19Patrick Jean-Baptiste I taught this book on Clubhouse, two, 300 people that attended over an eight week period. That's so great.

4:27Julia Gaffield That's awesome.

4:28Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yeah. And everyone, Julia, were like blown away. Some of them might have even contacted you already.

4:34Julia Gaffield Yeah. It's kinds of feedback are just so great. And I'm really grateful for that.

4:38Patrick Jean-Baptiste That feedback that I got from that audience who at 7 p.m. on Wednesday night showed up. Wow. Right. We were all taught that Haiti was completely isolated. So, or is it more nuanced than that?

4:52Julia Gaffield I think it's a little more nuanced. First, isolated is not the word I would use because that suggests a kind of complete cutoff. And what I really wanted to emphasize in the book is that it was in fact much more complicated. And there were ways that people of various kinds engaged with Haiti for various reasons. And that doesn't mean that diplomatic non-recognition wasn't important and significant. I think the emphasis on the isolation aspect kind of tells a narrative about Haiti that, you know, they were cut off from the world. Kind of a very parochial history that it's very local. And it really undermines a lot of the work that various heads of state did to try to change the diplomatic non-recognition. Right. So there was a lot of activism on the part of various Haitian diplomats and heads of state to integrate into the community of nations and empires in the Atlantic world. And so I saw like a number of problems with the framing and it erased first, it erased Dessalines as any kind of, you know, diplomatic leader. It kind of took away him as a, as an actor who is trying to negotiate with foreign governments to establish Haitian sovereignty. And then I think it creates this kind of narrative that after the revolution, Haiti was isolated and then basically it was bad news from there on. It also puts diplomatic recognition on this pedestal that I don't think it deserves to be on because even after they allegedly got diplomatic recognition, it didn't really mean that they were accepted, that Haiti was accepted as an equal nation state among the family of nations, you know? So it's not this kind of before recognition and after recognition break. It's much more of a spectrum. I think in the academic community, some of the problem was that a lot of the research that was being done, you know, since in the last two to three decades, a lot of that research was really focused on the revolution. And then, you know, they declare independence and that's the end of the story. Kind of my research program was like, okay, you win, you win the revolution. And, and like, then what, how do you sustain this country? Right? Like, how did they maintain independence? Which I think if you think about the fact that Haiti did remain independent in it, in and of itself is kind of mind blowing. And so I really wanted to figure that out. The ability to sustain independence to me didn't really fit with this isolation thesis. And the isolation thesis, PhD from York University, where I got my master's degree, his name's Thor Burnham, is the one who called it the isolation thesis. And his dissertation looked at marriage records in the 19th century. To my knowledge, he has not published it as a book, but it's an excellent dissertation. And so he called it this isolation thesis. And he had kind of started saying like, no, all these marriage records show that in fact, Haiti was not isolated. And he approached it from that perspective, but he was looking a little more at the mid 19th century. As I was kind of starting this research program, there was not a lot of attention to the, to the independence period. That was starting to change though. And, and Marlena Doubt has obviously been one of the people who has done a ton of research on this as well. And she was a few years ahead of me in terms of her career. So kind of, you know, we started having these conversations when I was still a grad student. I met her, I met her for the first time at the Haitian Studies Association Conference in Mont-Ruy, Haiti. And she just kind of blew my mind. But so there, there were, there wasn't, it wasn't like nobody was having these conversations, but it wasn't the, the kind of accepted narrative about what happened after independence. And so I think there's like a growing group that is kind of questioning what that means. And, and I, and I certainly don't want to kind of emphasize complexity and ambiguity, but it's a much more complicated story. And for various reasons, I think acknowledging that complexity is, is really important both for Haitian history, but also for the kind of broader age of revolutions history in terms of how people responded to Haitian independence.

9:42Patrick Jean-Baptiste You all are sort of pretty much looking at the same materials, right? When you go to the archives and how is it, how is it that these kinds of gaps happen? How much of that is institutional that's causing this sort of gap, if you will, versus how much of it is sort of a natural progression of disconnected people doing research on whatever interests them?

10:05Julia Gaffield Yeah. I mean, I think it, in a lot of ways, it depends on the, on the circumstance. So I'll just speak to, to kind of my own experiences. One of, when I, when I started saying that I wanted to study or wanted to research 1804 and after, one of the things that I heard kind of most frequently was like, eh, you're not really going to be able to write a dissertation about that because there aren't any sources. Right. Happily, my advisor at Duke, Laurent Dubois, disagreed with that conclusion and was like, there are absolutely enough sources to do this project. Go ahead. But, you know, related to kind of relating source base to the, the kind of, the conclusion that Haiti was isolated, I think is very much, if you, if you start with the fact that Haiti was isolated, then your source base is determined by kind of that relationship. Mm-hmm. And I think that's kind of, you know, in the, the first kind of, the first kind of inkling that I got of this, and one of the reasons was like, this isolation thing, I don't know. There's a couple pages in, I think it's Thomas Madieu. It could be, it could be, it could be, but I think it's Thomas Madieu where he talks about a diplomat from Jamaica coming to Haiti to negotiate a trade agreement. And I was like, what? And, and there's a couple pages on it, right? So, you know, this opens the door. That's, that's not isolation to me. Mm-hmm. That's, that's diplomatic engagement, international diplomacy. So, I went to visit the archives in Jamaica, particularly the National Library of Jamaica, where they have the records, the letters from the governor of Jamaica at the time when Haiti became independent. And, and, this is one of these, these kind of moments in the archive that, you know, like a lot of people think that the archives are like really cool and exciting. And they are to some degree, but they're also very like institutional and bureaucratic and, you know, not all that exciting. But this was one of those moments where, you know, the, the kind of, you're picturing yourself and sitting at a table and they bring out these like three enormous wooden boxes that look like, you know, somebody in a Hollywood film would describe the archives. Like they're kind of amazing. And in these boxes are, you know, like 10 inch high stacks of folded up letters that are tied with string. And, and so there's just all this material that's like original letters from Desalines writing to the governor of Jamaica and, you know, correspondence back and forth. And so to me, that was like, there, there was clearly engagement with the world outside of Haiti. And so we just need to start looking. And so my strategy kind of became like, what other archive can I go to? You know, what other, does it make, is there kind of a, like a very sliver, a small sliver of evidence to suggest that something could be in this archive? And I would go and I would inevitably find things either about Haiti or material from Haiti that then helped me put together this broader picture of Haiti in the Atlantic world. Rather than Haiti is isolated.

14:12Patrick Jean-Baptiste What time period are you covering in this book?

14:15Julia Gaffield I start, I start a little bit before the Declaration of Independence because Desalines kind of began, began planning for independence in like June of 1803. And so he's kind of setting the groundwork for the next months in terms of preparing for independence. So I, I start with, with that as the beginning of independence, because I really see that as the push for the independence movement. Around 1810 ish, depending on the moment. And I see this, you know, it's a very, it's kind of a bigger geographical perspective and a smaller chronological perspective.

14:57Patrick Jean-Baptiste Okay.

14:58Julia Gaffield And the reason why I chose to do that was because I wanted to show these kind of various strands of non-isolation. I kind of figured that after about 1810, the policies that got put in place, both within Haiti and by foreign governments, kind of stayed pretty constant until the 1825 ordinance. To me, it made sense to kind of dig deep on, on those years, the first decade, almost decade after around independence. And then what gets figured out there kind of stays in place, you know, 1825 and on is a bit of a different story.

15:41Patrick Jean-Baptiste Oh yeah. Right.

15:45Julia Gaffield I mean, I think it's also during that time period, there's also the, a lot more possibility in terms of, in terms of outcomes and the expectation, maybe not expectation, but the possibility of becoming an accepted and recognized nation among the family of nations of Europe and America, you know, the, the trade treaty that I talk about that Dessaline and the governor of Jamaica, George Nugent, were trying to negotiate was an example of how a European empire was trying to kind of put Haiti in a kind of an unequal status among the, among the family of nations. And Dessaline's response is like, absolutely not. We did not declare independence to now kind of lose our sovereignty through this treaty with you guys. Um, but by the 18, by 1825, um, it's kind of become clear that there's not a whole lot of other options. And this is one of the things that I find, uh, kind of very telling about the Haitian case is that in the Haitian case, the only case in the Americas in which the former colonizer was the first to extend official diplomatic recognition to the former colony. Right. So in, in the case of the U S France recognizes the U S before the British do in the case of, um, Latin America, the British recognize, um, independent countries before, um, the Portuguese or Spanish do. Right. So everybody waits and kind of respects hate or France's, uh, ongoing claims to, uh, dominion over Haiti. And that puts them in a position where this kind of compromise agreement with France is the, is the, becomes the only option. Whereas earlier there's, it's not clear that that's, that that's going to be the case.

17:47Patrick Jean-Baptiste Cause you did a comparing contrast between like the United States after the U S declared its independence. They didn't necessarily automatically get a free pass on the international stage. You had to wait. Right. And the same way that Haiti did. Can you talk about that? I forgot what term you use. Is it the admiralty laws or what was it that you called it?

18:08Julia Gaffield Uh, there's either the law of nations or, um, the comparison with the U S cases treaty worthiness.

18:15Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yes. Treaty worthiness. Yes. That's right.

18:17Julia Gaffield Yeah. In a lot of ways, the Haitian case is similar to how, um, the U S declared independence in a lot of other ways. It is very different. And I think what's, what's interesting in the time period that this book covers is that it's not clear that it's going to be that different. Um, immediately when the U S declared their independence, um, as the historian Elijah gold has, has written about recognition was not a given equality among nations was not a given. And so the U S had to embark on a project to secure what Elijah gold calls treaty worthiness. And so Haitian leaders also, um, tried to secure treaty worthiness, right? And this is the, the, the idea that a country could be, could be expected to reliably follow international treaties and to follow the agreed upon rules of, uh, the law of nations agreed upon might not be the right word to follow the, uh, customary practices of the law of nations. And so securing an international treaty was a really important way for a country to secure recognition, right? Signing a treaty would have amounted to diplomatic recognition. There's a lot of other things that kind of help diplomatic recognition and like sending a consul, um, is one way addressing the leader of the country by their title, um, calling the country by its name. These are all, uh, this is all kind of evidence of, of, of statehood. So there's, you know, a kind of an effort on the part, um, beginning with Desalines to secure treaty worthiness. He doesn't use this terminology, but this is why his negotiations with the governor of Jamaica were so important to, to a degree though. He wanted a treaty, but it had to be a treaty that reinforced Haitian statehood, Haitian independence, Haitian sovereignty. It couldn't be a treaty that established Haiti as an unequal nation. And so kind of thinking about the process of Haitian independence in the context of U.S. independence is, is really enlightening because they're, they're trying to do similar things. But of course, they're very different, um, histories, the very different revolution and the kind of deep racism of the international community means that the outcome is, is drastically different. The Napoleonic Wars are absolutely central to the, the story of Haiti's independence. It's kind of situating Desalines diplomatic negotiations with the governor of Jamaica, um, within that bigger context of the British being at war with the French, um, is essential, right? Because they, they are both kind of neighbors, potential allies, as well as being a threat to the economic system of, of the British colonies. And there, there was kind of a much longer history of negotiations and treaties. What Desalines was doing is building on an agreement between, uh, Louverture and Jamaica and Maitland, sorry, a general from, from Jamaica, but also kind of taking into consideration that we are no longer a French colony. Right. So in terms of reactions, right, like it's this, this isn't an event or a series of events that's happening in a vacuum. You know, they could kind of see eye to eye in terms of their deep hatred for France. And there's some strategy, right? Desalines was, was willing to at least publicly overlook the fact that, um, slavery was still legal in Jamaica at this time. He was willing to say like, you know, oh, your, your system wasn't as bad as what the French did. At least, you know, he was doing this publicly. He was doing this in his correspondence with the British, um, so that he could kind of foster these, these relationships and possible alliances. Um, so there's a practical nature to it. You know, we can't, sadly, he hasn't, hasn't left much evidence in terms of how these kind of public proclamations either matched or didn't match, uh, his own personal perspectives. But, um, if you're thinking about him as a head of state, right, this is, this is strategy. This is how you sustain your country's independence.

22:51Patrick Jean-Baptiste Can you talk about the, the part where I think it was the British official was concerned that, um, that he was just basically on a wall path to kill all white people. So if there was a treaty with Haiti, I think it was the British official that, uh, can he guarantee that the British citizens coming to Haiti will be protected? And he said something to the effect of, no, it's the French that I don't hate all white people. I just hate the French.

23:23Julia Gaffield And I mean, I think this ties into the, the text of the Declaration of Independence, right? He says eternal hatred to France and he's very specific about his unwillingness to forgive the French for what they've done. Again, I think that's strategic, right? Uh, saying, you know, the British, you have, you, we have no problems with you. Um, even though they have a parallel and similarly, uh, horrific system of slavery in their colonies. The evidence shows that, uh, British people, people from the U S people from other colonies who were in Haiti after 1804, um, were in fact protected. Their lives were not at risk. Um, and this was in, in the interest of kind of sustaining these other international relationships.

24:13Patrick Jean-Baptiste What, what is, uh, what is the role? Can you talk about the role of, of, of the merchant lobby? How influential were they in, in, in the negotiation process?

24:22Julia Gaffield The merchant lobby is absolutely essential. There were a lot of, uh, foreign merchants who were unwilling to give up the economic opportunities simply because there had been a change of government. Many Americans, um, many British merchants, um, did not care from whom they were buying, um, the products as long as they could buy it and sell. What's really interesting is that because of, uh, the insistence on diplomatic non-recognition, these merchants end up serving as kind of unofficial diplomats, um, in Haiti. And they're corresponding and interacting with, um, Haitian politicians and heads of state and then reporting back to their governments about what's going on, um, and pushing for recognition because it would help them. Right. If, if, if they did sign a treaty, it might help get, um, help them get better trade duties or whatever, you know, um, make it easier to trade with them, allow for protection for their, for their ships. So, um, they become, they fill this void, foreign diplomats in Haiti and end up being kind of semi-representatives of their country. Although, um, of course there's, uh, continual denial that they are in fact diplomats and serving in any official capacity, even though that's kind of what they're doing.

25:50Patrick Jean-Baptiste Where are the Haitian sisters in all of this?

25:52Julia Gaffield Yeah, I think this, this book admittedly did not do a great job in terms of thinking about the women involved in this story, right? It was very kind of heavily, heavily diplomatic history, some legal history in there. And a lot of that is just men doing things. I've tried as I'm writing the biography of Dessalines to find as much as I can and include as much as I can about Marie-Claire Heureux's later, uh, Madame Dessalines. I think she is such a fascinating figure because she is always there. And this includes in state ceremony. Um, this includes in, I think, kind of diplomatic events. This also includes on the battlefield. There's some kind of amazing sources that mention that she is very nearby during the Battle of Catepireau and that she kind of escapes with some of the other military wives. And there, she's just kind of always around, but it's also extremely frustrating because few accounts really describe her involvement and kind of what the contributions were in terms of these stories. So I'm trying to, to incorporate her, her narrative, um, and her contributions, um, as I move forward in my research. But, you know, she's clearly an important figure in terms of, this is, uh, I think one remarkable and, and perhaps unique, uh, situation is that she is like universally loved. Like both at the time and ever since then, like everybody who has ever written about her has nothing but amazing things to say. Which, which for somebody, uh, for, for any character in the Haitian Revolution, I think is remarkable. But she, uh, I think in some ways gets used what people see at the time and since then as, um, kind of Dessalines negative characteristics. So she ends up serving as, like an opposite to, to Jean-Jacques Dessalines. You know, she is wonderful and thoughtful and, um, compassionate and beautiful. And, you know, this is often contrasted, um, with other descriptions of Dessalines that portray him as, you know, um, all of this is in quotations like barbaric and savage and uncivilized and ugly. You know, all these other things, um, that, um, people attribute, uh, to Dessalines. So she's, she's, uh, I think a remarkable figure and it's really interesting to see how, um, she gets portrayed, particularly in the context of, you know, trying to condemn Dessalines too. So I think in, in certain circumstances, the, the wives of Haitian leaders, uh, Haitian generals would stand in for their husbands if they were unable to attend, um, particularly kind of ceremonies, you know, these kind of big or festivities, dinners. So she was probably the kind of host of this ball, um, because Dessalines couldn't attend. Um, and, and there's an interesting moment where, um, a few years earlier, um, Toussaint-Lé Valtierreau's wife, Suzanne, um, did the same thing for a celebration of, um, Dessalines' wedding. It wasn't his actual wedding. It was like a celebration of the wedding, but she stood in for her husband who, um, had to leave early to be, uh, somewhere else. Right. So they, they kind of, um, there's a ceremonial role that they play, um, at these, these very public events. Um, and there's, there's dinners, um, that she hosts with Henry Christophe later. But I think, you know, what is, what is always, uh, fun to imagine, but that is hard to do as a historian, um, is to kind of go beyond, you know, what their ceremonial role, um, was about the conversations that might've been happening during those events or before those events. Um, and that's really hard to access. Right. There's, there's a lot of different kinds of governments that, that get established after 1804. And I think that, that the nuances between them, right. Uh, as Chelsea Sieber has, uh, insisted the calling Haiti a Republic in 1804, uh, is, is kind of wrong and bad for a number of reasons. Mm-hmm. Right.

31:38Patrick Jean-Baptiste Although there's some point in there, you did say that, I don't forget who sent the, of course, and he says, yes, we're having our own internal issues here, but we're all thinking of one Haiti. Right. Was it this Aline who said that, or was it Christophe that, that, because there was some concerns by either the, by the British officials about, you know, what about this civil war you guys are, you know?

31:59Julia Gaffield Yeah. You, you, you can't negotiate, I mean, you can, they tried to negotiate a treaty while your country is embroiled in a civil war because, you know, from an outside perspective, and this is, this was the response of the British from an outside perspective. If we sign a treaty with you, how do we know that it's applicable to other parts of the country? Mm-hmm. It was, I'm president of the entire country. And so they're, they're very much at odds.

32:57Patrick Jean-Baptiste Why is it so important to have international diplomacy after the independence?

33:03Julia Gaffield Right. During the period that I'm studying, international diplomacy was essential because France was still claiming that Haiti was, or Saint-Domingue, as they continue to call it, was still their colony, right? Mm-hmm. So they're very much at all. These, these agreements and negotiations did help sustain their independence, right? As I kind of go through with, for example, the British Admiralty Courts, you know, the fact that there was legal and regulated trade with Haiti had implications for Haitian sovereignty or kind of an understanding of Haitian sovereignty. These, it required, you know, like Haiti was, Haitians were saying they were independent. The French were saying absolutely not. And had they been able to secure outside recognition, right? Then, then that doesn't put them in the spot that they ended up being in 1825. They had no other options in 1825 because everybody else was like, nah, we're, we're going to wait for the French. We're not going to step on their toes, especially after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Mm-hmm.

35:41Patrick Jean-Baptiste Didn't he go over the head of that governor in Jamaica to talk directly to the British crown? Isn't that some point he wanted to, well, like, why don't you go ask your bosses, you know? Kind of.

35:58Julia Gaffield Right. I mean, I think Dissaline very much recognized that there was, you know, like a chain of command within empires. And if he wasn't getting the response that he wanted from the governor of Jamaica, he was quite willing to say, okay, I'll, I'll contact your bosses in London and see what they have to say. Mm-hmm.

36:23Patrick Jean-Baptiste And that's been kind of what was most, what I find most fascinating about your book, too, is because of a lot of that stuff that was going on, this idea that, you know, Haiti was isolated also implied, I guess, in the mind of a lot of readers, me included, that, you know, like the leaders didn't know what was going on. They were fully aware and engaged with what was going on in the world, right? And, and, and the structures of these other governments and the metropoles and so on and so forth, right? So I think that's probably one of the biggest thing you did. You sort of kind of blew this, this book kind of blew that out of the water to say they were fully engaged with what was going on, you know, to the extent that Dissaline would say, hey, go talk to your boss. They might feel differently about that, you know?

37:12Julia Gaffield Right. And I think that this is part of a much broader attempt among people at the time, but in the centuries since then to, right? And this, and this ties into the isolation thesis, right? If, if they're isolated, you can't recognize Haitian leaders as diplomats, right? You can't frame them as kind of in the same, or you can't talk about them in the same conversation as all of the other founding fathers, right? It's part of the, Michel Rolf Trouillot's very famous, you know, silencing of the Haitian revolution. It's also, it spills over into the independence era. And if you're not recognizing Haitian heads of state as, you know, politicians, as diplomats, then you're, you're kind of contributing to this, the historic moment that, that refused to recognize Haiti.

38:12Patrick Jean-Baptiste How much did this Aline's death have on that, on the negotiating process for Haiti as a whole?

38:23Julia Gaffield It, I think it, it weirdly, his death specifically does not kind of register as a big moment in international diplomacy. What is, what is more important is the civil war that follows for the reason that, you know, signing a treaty with, with one leader or another still kind of leaves it up in the air as to whether it's going to apply throughout the country. I, in, in, in, in a surprising way, it kind of registers as a non-event in, and I, and I think it's surprising because, you know, in a political assassination does not kind of reflect well, uh, a country's, you know, ability to, uh, follow law rules of international law or law of nations at the time. You know, this is, uh, this is, uh, this is, uh, this is, uh, this is, uh, a narrative that has been repeated, um, up to very recently that, you know, it kind of, it reflects poorly on the country. Um, and so in, in, in my research, um, in the early 19th century, um, it surprisingly did not kind of occupy that much space in terms of, uh, yeah, foreign decisions to, to engage with Haiti or not. I think I'll have to think more about that. Um, particularly in the, in the biography. Thank you for the question.

39:55Patrick Jean-Baptiste No problem.

39:56Julia Gaffield I'm going to keep thinking.

39:57Patrick Jean-Baptiste What's that?

39:58Julia Gaffield I'm going to keep thinking about it. So thank you.

40:00Patrick Jean-Baptiste So, so one final question for you. What, what is the, did you, were you ever able to quantify how much trade in terms of numbers, you know, import export that occurred during the, the 10 years post-independence that you covered? How much actual trade did go on? Did you ever put a number to it? Or is that somewhere? Or I don't remember seeing it in the book.

40:28Julia Gaffield I have not. Um, and some of that has to do with, um, the records that are available. Um, I think the closest to kind of, you know, import export numbers comes from, um, Rayford Logan, um, whose book, the diplomatic relations of the United States. Sorry. I'm looking at, I'm looking over at my shelf, um, to see the full title. Um, it's a UNC press book from the mid 20th century and it's amazing. But he did a lot of work in terms of quantifying, um, important export, um, numbers, um, from Haiti. But for the early independence period, I really wasn't able, um, to do that kind of calculation. I didn't, um, totally try. Um, it's possible that from, uh, you know, newspaper accounts or, or other types of shipping records, uh, that somebody could do it. I hope somebody could do it. That'd be awesome.

41:26Patrick Jean-Baptiste You said Rayford Logan, right?

41:28Julia Gaffield Yeah.

41:28Patrick Jean-Baptiste What's the diplomatic?

41:30Julia Gaffield Let me, sorry, grab the whole book. Um, they cut off half the title on the, okay. It's the diplomatic relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776 to 1891. And it's, and it's, uh, it's like a kind of old school diplomatic history and it's amazing.

41:52Patrick Jean-Baptiste Oh, that's awesome. You know, the, the next evolution of this, uh, you know, of this podcast is for it to go video. Remember, remember MTV cribs back in the day? I want to do like a scholarly crib. Well, I look at yours bookshelves and you'll just talk about your bookshelves.

42:14Julia Gaffield That would be, that would be great.

42:19Patrick Jean-Baptiste I appreciate it. Uh, I hope we can do this again. I hope so too. The audience have been asking about that. I'm like, where's the, where's the biography on this? I mean, we keep hearing, you know, Christophe and, and, and, and to say that's fine. But what about this? I mean, what about this? I mean, what's the, and then the conspiracy theorists, you know, they're just, they're just filling up that space, you know?

42:40Julia Gaffield Well, that's why, I mean, that's why I wanted to write it because, um, you know, there's been like, I don't know how many, 50 million biographies of Toussaint-Li Velture in like the last five years. Maybe not like 10 years, whatever. But there's been a whole bunch of them. And, um, you know, I think, uh, Christophe is now, um, he gets two biographies, which is like, not that many.

43:10Patrick Jean-Baptiste Right. Yeah.

43:12Julia Gaffield And so I, you know, I think, I think Desalines deserves at least one biography and probably many more, you know, like, I hope this is, uh, I hope other people decide to also write biographies of Desalines because I think there's room for, um, a lot more scholarship on him.

43:32Patrick Jean-Baptiste Uh, so this is going to be the first, at least in the English speaking world, right. Or period, this is the first, this could be the first biography on Desaline period.

43:42Julia Gaffield Yeah. I think other, uh, some of like, I think there's a couple that might've been translated into English. Um, but yes, although I'm, I'm hoping to try to encourage, uh, the press not to try to be like the first, this, the first, whatever. Um, because I don't want to, you know, discount a lot of the biographies that have been written about him, just, you know, not in English.

44:07Patrick Jean-Baptiste Um, but it is, you know, the foundational, is it going to be foundational?

44:12Julia Gaffield I don't know about that.

44:15Patrick Jean-Baptiste You know, it's just between us, you know, I just won't get, you know, you're still recording,

44:19Julia Gaffield I think.

44:20Patrick Jean-Baptiste So no, I mean, would you put your Desaline in sort of the same foundational space as save the, the making of Haiti? Um, there's going to be a lot of new materials for future scholars to mine, right?

44:37Julia Gaffield I'm hoping so. I'm, yeah, I'm hoping that yes, to bring it back full circle. I'm hoping that people will say, don't miss the footnotes.

44:47Patrick Jean-Baptiste Okay.

44:48Julia Gaffield You know, that's, that's a hope, you know, that's what I'm kind of aspiring to. Um, because I think there's a lot of material that it would be really great if, you know, other people analyzed it and wrote about it and wrote new narratives.

45:05Patrick Jean-Baptiste Awesome. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Julia. Thank you for educating me and the audience. I really appreciate it.

45:18Julia Gaffield Thank you for all the work that you do and for your patience with me. And I look forward to continuing the conversation.

45:23Patrick Jean-Baptiste Thank you. the