The Haitians: Chapter Notes — Chapters 4 and 5

Detailed research notes on Chapters 4 (Slaves or Peasants) and 5 (The Pursuit of Impossible Segregation) of Jean Casimir's The Haitians: A Decolonial History. Chapter 4 establishes that the counter-plantation system emerged during the revolutionary crisis of 1791-1804, not after it, and that Haitian cultivators chose 'dignified precariousness' as a conquest against the oligarchy's plantation restoration project. Chapter 5 traces the state's repeated failures to impose plantation discipline on a laboring majority that already possessed the counter-plantation institutions — lakou, Vodou, Kreyòl — as sovereign alternatives.