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From the perspective of the history of France and its Atlantic Empire, what in the United States is known as the "Louisiana Purchase" is remembered as the "Sale of Louisiana." And it has traditionally been interpreted as primarily, if not exclusively, the result of European "balance-of-power" politics, specifically the complicated diplomatic and political tensions between France and Britain during the brief period of peace that lasted from late 1801 until 1803. But, as Robert Paquette has emphasized, seeing Bonaparte's decision to sell Louisiana in purely European terms is "rather parochial," for it is impossible to separate the "balance-of-power" between Britain and France at this point from events in one of the central theaters of imperial conflict: the Caribbean, and particularly Saint-Domingue. The events in this colony, he notes, were certainly shaped by European imperial rivalries, but they shaped these rivalries as well, "in some cases decisively."1
The transfer of Louisiana was one such case. The most important causal force in shaping France's sale of Louisiana was not the diplomatic maneuverings and choices of European governments, but the actions of a revolutionary movement in a colony on the verge of becoming the independent nation of Haiti. By refusing Bonaparte's plan to re-enslave them, the people who made up this movement - most of them former slaves - "drastically limited Napoleon's capacity to fulfill his western design and to project power in the Americas."2 They therefore rendered French designs on Louisiana irrelevant and thus paved the way for its cession to the United States.
The connection between the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution is rich with irony: it was the courage of men and women fighting to preserve their liberty, and the leadership of the one-time slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines, that made possible one of Thomas Jefferson's signal political achievements, one of whose major results was the expansion of slavery in the United States. But remembering the centrality of Haiti in the transfer of Louisiana also calls for us to think differently about the broader place and significance of this event: what is often remembered as a remarkably "peaceful" transfer of land was in fact predicated on events of enormous violence that took place in the Caribbean. The war for liberty and independence that created Haiti was...