The Haitians: Chapter Notes — Chapters 9 and 10

Detailed research notes on Chapters 9 (An Independent State without a Sovereign People) and 10 (The State in the Nineteenth Century) of Jean Casimir's The Haitians. Chapter 9 argues that the 1804 Haitian state was born as a colonial despotism whose oligarchs inherited France's right of conquest rather than breaking with colonial logic — abolishing slavery while retaining the 'house arrest of the workers.' Chapter 10 traces the 19th-century trajectory of this founding paradox through land distribution, rural codes, and the chronic failure of oligarchic authority to penetrate a laboring majority organized through counter-plantation institutions.