Review of International Studies (2006), 32, 379–400 Copyright  British International Studies Association

doi:10.1017/S0260210506007078

What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the

transformation of sovereignty debate
ROBBIE SHILLIAM*

Abstract. Post World War I, Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African movement managed to coalesce,
however briefly and imperfectly, an extra-territorial sovereign authority in the form of the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Through the recollection of this project
the article seeks to disturb the predominant uni-linear narrative in IR debates of the
transformation of sovereignty that posit a recent shift from territorial exclusivity to multi-level
governance encapsulated in the emergence of the European Union. By narrating a string of
transformations of sovereignty that led to Garvey’s UNIA the case is made that such
transformations have not directly followed one universal logic but have been multi-linear in
character, and further, extra-territoriality has been a defining principle of sovereignty in the
modern epoch and by no means peculiar to the contemporary European milieu. Through
exploring the generative relationship between capitalist, nationalist and racialist forms of
sovereignty the article contributes theoretically and empirically to a historical sociology
adequate to capture the multiple, yet related, transformations of sovereignty in the modern
epoch.

Introduction

At the height of its influence, in the aftermath of World War I, Marcus Garvey’s
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) stretched across 800 chapters in
40 countries on four continents. It boasted nearly a million members with up to three
times as many active participants, and communicated to them through its newspaper,
The Negro World, in three language editions: English, French and Spanish.1 But size
and spread alone do not make the UNIA remarkable. For Garvey’s race association
displayed all the trappings usually associated with a sovereign nation-state:2 the
UNIA organised paramilitary and auxiliary units; it had a civil service that

* My thanks to Martin Hall, Justin Rosenberg, Beate Jahn, Julian Saurin, the Editor, one
anonymous reviewer in particular, and special thanks to Gurminder Bhambra for comments and
suggestions.
1
Theodore G. Vincent,. Black Power and the Garvey Movement (Berkeley, CA: Ramparts Press,
1971), p. 13; and Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in
Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998), p. 136; Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and
Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Westview Press,
1996), p. 115.
2
William A. Edwards, ‘Garveyism: Organizing the Masses or Mass Organization?’, in Rupert Lewis
and Patrick Bryan (eds.), Garvey: His Work and Impact (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1991),
pp. 216–17; and Randolph B. Persaud, ‘Re-envisioning Sovereignty: Marcus Garvey and the
Making of a Transnational Identity’, in Kevin Dunn and Timothy Shaw (eds.), Africa’s Challenge
to International Relations Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 119.

379
380 Robbie Shilliam

administered its own exams; it issued passports to workers migrating into the bigger
cities of the US; it operated a parallel court system for its members; it flew its own
flag – the red, black and green; and members sung their own national anthem –
Ethiopia, thou Land of our Fathers.3 The UNIA also owned its own shipping
company, the Black Star Line, and a cooperative, the Negro Factories Corporation,
all owned by, staffed by, and servicing its members. One might even say that in this
respect the UNIA sought to institutionalise its own exclusive economy.4
What is more, evidence exists that the international community thought seriously
about recognising the UNIA as the sovereign entity that it professed to be. For
example, in 1922 the UNIA petitioned the League of Nations to turn over ex-German
African colonies to its own leadership. UNIA delegates managed to secure a meeting
with the director of the mandates section of the League, and during the subsequent
conferences they were seated in a manner indicative of official recognition.5 Addition-
ally, there was at this time a current of opinion in British politics that the government
should grant quasi-official recognition to the UNIA in order for it to represent the
interests of British–Jamaican workers in Cuba.6 In fact, the Governor of Jamaica at
the time compared Garvey’s nationalistic project in all seriousness to that of Sun Yat
Sen’s.7 In sum, it could be said that Garvey managed to coalesce, however briefly and
imperfectly, an extra-territorial Pan-African sovereign authority in the form of the
UNIA. And quite simply, the recollection of this historical project presents a
fundamental challenge to the mainstream debate over the transformation of sover-
eignty currently at play in International Relations (IR).
This debate, in the main, depends upon an historical narrative that assumes an
unprecedented transformation of sovereignty from a (putatively) Westphalian terri-
torial principle to a post-Westphalian extra-territorial principle. We stand, it is
claimed, at the threshold of a new globalised and multi-dimensional articulation of
sovereignty, wherein nation-states, regional organisations, and international organi-
sations overlap.8 However, if this debate seeks to understand sovereignty as (now)
multi-dimensional and extra-territorial, it usually does so via an understanding of

3
Tony Martin, Race First: the Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (London: Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 42; Vincent, Black
Power, p. 167; UNIA, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World’, in E. David
Cronin (ed.), Marcus Garvey (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 35–6.
4
Vincent, Black Power, p. 166; Edwin S. Redkey, ‘The Flowering of Black Nationalism: Henry
McNeal Turner and Marcus Garvey’, in John Henrik Clarke (ed.), Marcus Garvey and the Vision of
Africa (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 394.
5
See especially, Martin, Race First, pp. 45–7. See also Lauren, Power and Prejudice, p. 122.
6
Tony Martin, ‘Marcus Garvey, the Caribbean, and the Struggle for Black Jamaican Nationhood’,
in Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (eds.), Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from
Emancipation to the Present (London: James Curry, 1993), p. 360.
7
Ibid., p. 361. See also Robert Weisbord, ‘Marcus Garvey, Pan-Negroist: the View from Whitehall’,
in Race, 11:4 (1970), pp. 419–29.
8
Various aspects of this narrative are reproduced in Daniele Archibugi, ‘Principles of Cosmopolitan
Democracy’, in Daniele Archibugi, David Held and Martin Köhler (eds.), Re-Imagining Political
Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 198–228;
David Held, ‘Democracy and the New International Order’, in Daniele Archibugi and David Held
(eds.), Cosmopolitan Democracy: an Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1995), pp. 96–120; Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical
Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Daniel Philpott,
‘Westphalia, Authority, and International Society’, in Political Studies, 47:3 (1999), pp. 566–89; and
Barry Buzan and Richard Little, ‘Beyond Westphalia? Capitalism After the ‘‘Fall’’ ’, in Review of
International Studies, 25:5 (1999), pp. 89–104.
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 381

historical transformation that is uni-linear in character: the meaning of world history

is effectively exhausted in the categorisation of one universal transformation in the
principle of sovereignty after another.9
Moreover, within this grand-narrative, the EU is overwhelmingly considered as
exemplifying the uni-linear transformation of sovereignty. While the non-European
world might be present in these narratives, it is usually incorporated in a ‘passive’
way. Acknowledgement of the ‘special case’ of the Third World, for example, is often
used simply as a foil with which to highlight the specificity of, and/or augment
various interpretations of, the development of sovereignty in Europe (and in contrast
to the ‘Third World’, the ‘West’ in general).10 Alternatively, the rest of the world is
simply understood as following, or catching up with Europe/the West via a
‘diffusionist’ model of political development.11 And even when some authors do take
seriously the continuing differentiation between European principles of sovereignty
and those of the non-Western world, there still often exists the assumption that the
European milieu is the battleground upon which the progressive struggle of political
rights proceeds.12
Simply put, I claim that this grand-narrative is inadequate for the purpose of
explaining the historical existence of Garvey’s Pan-African project. However, this
inadequacy runs far deeper than merely failing to account for this ‘curious’ and
‘exotic’ association. In fact, Garvey’s UNIA represents a more general phenomenon
of political organisation. For the world-historical tides at the fin de siècle did not just
leave a high watermark of nationalism: rather, at the same time, a number of
trans-national and/or extra-territorial political and intellectual currents drove the
political upheavals surrounding World War I.13 Some of these projects were new,
others were established, and some were practically pursued while others were only
conceptualised.
There continued, of course, the various Workers’ Internationals, the Third
manifestation of which arose as a direct response to working class nationalism in the
run up to the Great War. But additionally, the period saw the rise of a number of
international women’s movements; the International Council of Women reported a
membership of four to five million in 1907, and by 1925 had persuaded the League
of Nations to form a joint standing committee to aid the mobilisation of ‘. . . the
9
Constructivist accounts often mirror this historical understanding too. See for example, John G.
Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’ in
International Organization, 47:1 (1993), pp. 139–74; Samuel J. Barkin and Bruce Cronin, ‘The State
and the Nation: Changing Norms and the Rules of Sovereignty in International Relations’, in
International Organization, 48:1 (1994), pp. 107–30; Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Human Rights and the
Social Construction of Sovereignty’, in Review of International Studies, 27:4 (2001), pp. 519–38.
10
For example, Stephen Krasner employs this strategy to prove his hypothesis of sovereignty as
‘organized hypocrisy’. See ‘Rethinking the Sovereign State Model’, in Review of International
Studies, 27:5 (2001), p. 25.
11
Elements of this model can be gleaned in Held, ‘Democracy and the New International Order’. But
see especially Robert H. Jackson’s influential Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and
the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 54–5. On ‘diffusionism’ see
James Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusion and Eurocentric History
(London: Guilford, 1993).
12
This seems to form the subtext of Linklater’s recent work. See, for example ‘Cosmopolitan
Citizenship’, in Kimberley Hutchings and Roland Dannreuther (eds.), Cosmopolitan Citizenship
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 43–5. Outside of IR, see the survey article by Heidrun Friese
and Peter Wagner, ‘The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity’, in The Journal of
Political Philosophy, 10:3 (2002), pp. 342–64.
13
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of this broader context.
382 Robbie Shilliam

potential motherhood of the world’.14 Indeed, even in nineteenth century Europe,

Pan-nationalism was by no means an oddity. For example, Central and Eastern
Europe elites had regularly utilised Pan-Slavism as a strategy to mobilise Tsarist
Russia in a protective response to the expansion of West European nationalist
agendas.15 And within the capitalist heartland itself, notions of a new polity, an
intercontinental commonwealth, had already contributed to the debate over how best
to protect the British empire from upstart contenders.16
Outside of Europe, and alongside Pan-Africanism, there existed at least two other
notable extra-territorial political projects. The first, Pan-Islamism, arose initially out
of the response, by the Ottoman Empire, to territorial incursions by the ‘West’,
wherein the Tanzimat reforms sought to defensively modernise the Empire against
the threat of Western imperialism. Pan-Islamic discourse sought to transcend not
only sectarian divides (for example, between Sunni and Shi’a), but also the
boundaries of existing political authorities. By the time of the Great War, the Khilafat
movement in British India, an elite-led but popular Pan-Islamic movement, sought to
replace political loyalty to the colonial ‘mother-country’ with loyalty to Britain’s
war-time enemy, Turkey (political seat of the Caliphate).17 The second, a Pan-
Asianism project, developed in the years following the Meiji Restoration (1868),
borne of another defensive modernisation project this time pushed forward by
elements of Japan’s Samurai stratum. Initially, and before its own imperial turn,
Pan-Asianism in Japan formed part of the attempt to resist the ‘Westernisation’ of
Asia. But from 1911 in China, the same discourse was used to promote an alternative
to the perceived materialism and violence of Western civilisation. Pan-Asianism was
mobilised by various contending factions to appeal for fiscal and moral aid from the
Chinese Diaspora spread across Asia and America.18
None of this is to say that such projects were anti, or ‘post’ national; and of
course, all had to tortuously negotiate universal claims with particular interests (I
shall speak to these points in the following analysis). Nevertheless, it is still the case
that the mainstream grand-narrative that underpins the transformation of sover-
eignty debate holds no firm place for these extra-territorial projects.
By asking, ‘what about Marcus Garvey?’,19 this article therefore contributes to a
growing body of historical–sociological literature that is critical of the uni-linear

14
Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 37–41.
15
See Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: its History and Ideology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1953).
16
Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space and Empire in British Political
Thought, 1770–1900’, in Journal of Modern History, 77:3 (2005), pp. 523–62.
17
See Amira J. Bennison, ‘Muslim Universalism and Western Globalization’, in A. G. Hopkins (ed.),
Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 74–97; and B. R. Nanda, Ghandi:
Pan-Islamism, Imperialism and Nationalism in India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1989),
especially pp. 113–15.
18
See, for example, Prasenjit Duara, ‘The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism’, in Journal of
World History, 12:1 (2001), pp. 99–130; and Rebecca E. Karl, ‘Creating Asia: China in the World
at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, in American Historical Review, 103:4 (1998),
pp. 1096–118.
19
There are few works that directly address the challenge of Garvey’s UNIA to narratives of world
development in IR in a sustained fashion. But see Hilbourne Watson, ‘Theorizing the Racialization
of Global Politics and the Caribbean Experience’, in Alternatives, 26:4 (2001), pp. 449–83; and
Persaud, ‘Re-envisioning Sovereignty’. Persaud’s account is an especially illuminating one, and this
article seeks to further develop a number of his suggestive comments.
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 383

meta-framing of world history in IR centred upon a Westphalian transformation.20

In what follows I argue, in general, that the transformation of sovereignty in the
modern epoch has been a multi-linear phenomenon; furthermore, extra-territoriality,
rather than being a late twentieth century exception, has in fact been a defining
principle of sovereignty in the modern epoch, and by no means one peculiar to the
European milieu. Specifically, I argue that transformations of sovereignty in modern
world history have been centred upon a common problematic of development: the
attempt to match the universality and unanimity of a specific political subject – the
free and equal individual borne of British capitalism. I argue that it is the peculiar
nature of this capitalist subject, and more so the cumulative yet differential attempts
to critically embrace this subject in various non-capitalist polities, that allows the
modern epoch to be understood as one not defined by a uni-linear territorial closure
(the common ‘Westphalian’ position), but, in many ways, the opposite – a multiple
disturbing of the co-constitutive relationship between the subject, sovereign and
particular locale.
In constructing this alternative narrative, the article takes an Historical Materialist
understanding of ‘sovereignty’ as, at its root, the form of political authority through
which various rights and duties of social reproduction are institutionalised. The
political subject encoded in law is framed by these rights and duties, and as such can
be understood as the ‘embodiment’ of the principle of sovereignty. It should be noted
briefly that this subject does not naturally resolve to the ‘individual’; historically, this
subject has more often been communally delineated. Through struggles over the
legitimacy of this framing of the political subject – such as through struggles over the
rights and duties of social reproduction – the transformation of sovereignty inher-
ently possesses a moral dimension.

20
This critical literature incorporates a number of different approaches. Firstly, there is the retrieval
of forms of political authority other than ‘Westphalian’ for understandings of world history; see for
example, Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach, Polities: Authority, Identities, and Change
(Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); the special issue on ‘Empires, Systems
and States: Great Transformations in International Politics’, Review of International Studies, 27:5
(2001); and the review article by Martin Hall, ‘International Relations and World History’, in
European Journal of International Relations, 8:4 (2002), pp. 499–516. Secondly, there has re-emerged
a concern to rethink international relations in modern world history as imperial relations; see, for
example, Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International
Relations’, in Millennium, 31:1 (2002), pp. 109–27; and John M. Hobson and J. C. Sharman, ‘The
Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World Politics: Tracing the Social Logics of Hierarchy and Political
Change’, in European Journal of International Relations, 11:1 (2005), pp. 63–98. Thirdly, the notion
of ‘civilization’ has been used to foreground the importance of a multi-linear array of cultural value
systems in the making of world order. See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); and alternatively Robert Cox,
‘Thinking about Civilization’, in Review of International Studies, 26:5 (2000), pp. 217–34. Fourthly,
the constitutive importance of a multi-linearity of forms of sovereignty in the making of world
order has been increasingly investigated through Historical Materialist approaches. See especially,
Benno Teschke, ‘Bourgeois Revolution, State-Formation and the Absence of the International’, in
Historical Materialism, 13:2 (2005), pp. 3–6; Hannes Lacher, Beyond Globalization: Capitalism,
Territoriality and the International Relations of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006); and Justin
Rosenberg, ‘Why is there no International Historical Sociology?’, in European Journal of
International Relations, 12 (2006, forthcoming). This article is situated within the fourth approach.
384 Robbie Shilliam

However, the method employed here further argues that there is an international
dimension to this transformation.21 For differentially developed sovereignties cast a
comparative light on each other, in terms of both the legitimacy of the rights and
duties they accord to their political subjects, and the capacity of their structures of
social reproduction to power the sinews of the polity – that is, taxation adequate to
pay for a strong military or policing arm.22 Via existing power struggles within a
polity an attempt is made to import a principle of sovereignty that is deemed by one
faction to valorise their specific struggle. But in grafting on this ‘alien’ political
subject, various substitutions are required to compensate for the institutions of social
reproduction that, present in the ‘home’ of the ‘alien’ subject, are missing in this
‘foreign’ domain. Existing institutions are therefore mobilised to perform novel tasks,
and through this process of substitution a novel political subject is created that
contemporaneously articulates a novel principle of sovereignty and a novel encoding
of rights and duties to its contemporaneous ‘original’. In other words, the inter-
national dimension of social transformation consists of acts of comparison that lead,
most importantly, to processes of substitution. And it is the unintended consequences
deriving from this dimension of social transformation that produces the multi-linear
character of transformations of sovereignty.
As might be clear by now, this approach is not simply ‘macro-level’ but seeks to
also capitalise on the insights of a ‘micro-level’ approach. Although I do not here
write a straightforward ‘history from below’, I nevertheless concentrate on the way
in which struggles over sovereignty are struggles by elites to frame the rights and
duties through which political subjects perceive their place in the world. More
specifically, the article tries to appreciate the way in which the international
dimension of social transformation is foundational to this struggle over perception
through the act of comparison and, especially, the process of substitution. Crucially,
this approach obviates the simple capacity-based understanding of ‘power’ prevalent
in IR. In fact, I have selected Garvey’s Pan-African form of sovereignty for historical
investigation not only because it highlights an aspect of political subjectivity,
contemporaneously developing to, yet most often left outside the mainstream
narrative of, European sovereignty – racial identity.23 But also, I purposefully
highlight the very fragility of racially delineated sovereignty in order to make the case
that the lived experience of the political subject is crucial for a more sophisticated
understanding of the meaning and exercise of ‘power’ regarding transformations of
sovereignty. Of course, the failures of so many of the extra-territorial projects at the
beginning of the twentieth century, Garvey’s included, must be taken with all due
seriousness. Yet the point is that failure of a political project does not necessarily
extinguish its continued historical import for the lived experience of various political
subjects. To appreciate the importance of the multi-linear character of modern world
development, one must approach the issue of power and sovereignty with a sensitivity
to the above concerns.

21
The postulates laid out here are derived from an interpretation of Leon Trotsky’s theory of ‘uneven
and combined development’. In IR, see Rosenberg, ‘Why is There No International Historical
Sociology?’; and Robbie Shilliam, ‘Hegemony and the Unfashionable Problematic of ‘Primitive
Accumulation’’, in Millennium, 33:1 (2004), pp. 59–88.
22
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin
Hyman, 1989).
23
On race and IR see, for example, the Special Issue of Alternatives, 26:4 (2001).
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 385

The argument proceeds by unwinding one crucial string of the related and
contemporaneous transformations of sovereignty that led to Garvey’s UNIA, a
string that links British capitalism to French Jacobinism, French Jacobinism to
Haitian Black Jacobinism, and finally Black Jacobinism to Garvey’s Pan-
Africanism.24 The aim is to show how and why the politically free and equal
individual of British capitalism was transformed via its importation into successive
differentially developed socio-political milieus. The cumulative nature of these
transformations in sovereignty means that not all the actors involved enjoyed a direct
and conscious correspondence with all prior forms of sovereignty. This correspon-
dence should rather be understood in terms of an historically developing structure,
generated through the international dimension of social transformation, that framed
and reframed the contestation over rights and duties of the political subject. Hence
my elucidation of Garvey’s UNIA depends upon a prior investigation of a series of
seemingly disparate historical episodes.
Finally, I do not, here, dwell on exposing the generative effects of ‘feed-back’
between the forms of sovereignty discussed above. And for any full exposure of the
multi-linear character of transformations of sovereignty this would be a crucial task.
However, the central task of this particular article is to highlight the generative
quality of the international dimension of social transformation, for it is only through
this strategy that such ‘exotic’ curiosities as Garvey’s UNIA might be made
intelligible. In so doing, this article provides an important intervention in the existing
debate by calling attention to the fact that much worldwide historical and contem-
porary lived experience is excluded and made invisible by a uni-linear narrative that
implicitly takes a hermetically sealed Europe to be both the motor and destination of
the modern political subject.

The rights of property and the Rights of Man

In this section the British and French transformations of sovereignty are engaged
with primarily in order to elucidate the relational yet differentiated character of two
forms of political subject: the capitalist ‘impersonalised individual’, and the Jacobin
‘impersonal collective’. An exposure of the character of these subjects, and their
developmental relationship, is necessary in order to make sense of the racial
transformation of sovereignty that will be documented in the next section. For
reasons of space, the capitalist transformation of sovereignty in England is dealt with
here only schematically so as to provide a point of comparison with regards to
preceding and contemporaneous forms of sovereignty.
Prior to the onset of enclosure in England, political rights and duties were
articulated through a complex system of personal (and asymmetric) reciprocity

24
To be clear, this article does not engage with Pan-Africanism as a general phenomenon, but
specifically with its Garveyite articulation. Garvey’s contemporary, W. E. B. Dubois, is usually
considered the ‘father’ of Pan-Africanism. However, if Dubois has more often been favoured in
intellectual circles, Garvey by far exercised the widest and deepest Pan-African influence over
Africans and the Black Diaspora in the twentieth century. For an overview of Pan-Africanism see
Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement (London: Methuen, 1968).
386 Robbie Shilliam

between manor lord and peasant.25 Lords upheld access to manorial resources,
especially common land, as well as protection of the local community; and in return,
the peasantry performed various duties ranging from military service to work on the
demesne.26 Political subjects were therefore encoded in a set of communal bodies,
with each body structured through ‘relations of personal dependence’27 and deline-
ated with direct reference to geographical locale. English sovereignty, as a whole, was
formed through the hierarchical organisation of such locales.
By separating the rights and duties of communal social reproduction from the
actual ownership of the means of production, the enclosure process privatised
property so that it became an a-social object.28 This shift, however, required a
transformation of the political subject itself away from its encoding as a communal
being enjoying rights and duties directly embedded in the issue of social reproduction.
After all, it was only a socially un-encumbered political subject – impersonalised and
individualised – that might rightfully hold a-social objects. This new subject, the
impersonalised individual, was encoded (albeit haphazardly) in ‘common law’.29 Here,
the dependence of political subjects upon each other now became mediated through
the proxy of a-social ‘things’ – property – as contractual relations.30
This new social intercourse of impersonalised interdependency was institutional-
ised in ‘civil society’ – a space populated exclusively by politically free and equal
individuals. Civil society, as the realm of contractual relations, allowed for a formal
levelling of the political subject, even while at the same time ensuring that the
distribution of substantive socioeconomic power – access to and control over the
means of production – remained unequal. In other words, civil society enabled the
rights of the political subject to become universally applicable across and regardless
of socioeconomic status and particular circumstance. Indeed, even though various
‘poor laws’ were legislated in an attempt to compensate for the loss of livelihood
visited by enclosure, what is crucial to note is that such political duties only ever
functioned as an appendage to the rights of property.31
Therefore the political space of civil society, despite – in fact because of – the
a-social egoistic quality of its social intercourse, exhibited an unprecedented unanim-
ity in the political standing of the individuals associating within. For this capitalist
form of political authority posited no directly political hierarchy of political subjects;
hierarchy, instead, was levelled into one universal political subject. Again, this could
be achieved only by abstracting the rights and duties of this political subject from any
substantive socioeconomic content. And these qualities of universality and unanimity
25
Jeanette M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England,
1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 313–26.
26
On customary rights, see E. P. Thompson, ‘Custom, Law and Common Right’, in Customs in
Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), pp. 97–184; and Richard Lachman, From Manor to
Market: Structural Change in England, 1530–1640 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,
1987), pp. 38–9.
27
This term is derived from Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993), p. 158.
28
Thompson, ‘Custom, Law and Common Right’, p. 135.
29
Douglas Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, and
E. P. Thompson (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1975), p. 32.
30
The phrase is from Marx, Grundrisse, p. 158.
31
See Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
A. Lee Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen,
1985); Lachman, Manor to Market, pp. 137–8; and Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 78.
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 387

within the political space of civil society will reveal themselves as crucial to the
transformations documented forthwith. Moreover, British32 capitalist sovereignty no
longer boasted a political subject the rights and duties of which were directly
delineated by particular territorial locale. For to uphold the rights of private property
demanded at least a functional separation between the territorial place and the social
space political authority protected, namely the realm of private property and
contract. In short, civil society, the universe of free and equal individuals, was an
empire unto itself.33
Such a paradoxical and alien form of sovereignty unavoidably came to impinge
upon neighbouring political authorities. Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century
absolutist France was embroiled in a colonial geo-political competition with Britain
that was as much a contest over the structure of political authority as it was over
practical capacities.34 Specifically, the British parliament had amassed a scaleable
public debt made possible by an investor confidence in the institutionalisation of civil
society and private property that allowed for a switch from short-term to long-term
borrowing with which to finance the colonial wars.35 In France, however, it was still
the person of the king who borrowed: debts, for example, might even be forfeited on
the death of the original divine debtor.36 Such risks forbade long-term borrowing
and the financing of war was sharply limited. With a massive debt that now over-
shadowed the crown even in peace-time, and with no compensatory spoils of war,
elements of the French ruling strata increasingly agitated for national ‘regenera-
tion’.37 To the French bourgeoisie (along with their fellow travellers from the nobility
and clergy) the British bourgeoisie, while being a destabilising foe, was now at the
same time a mentor.38 In these ways the comparative light cast upon French
absolutism produced by British capitalism progressively delegitimised and substan-
tively weakened Bourbon sovereignty.
The eventual proclamation of a new political subject in the Déclaration des Droits
de l’Homme et du Citoyen, took its cue directly from Britain’s new world sibling. But
while the American Declaration had taken the form of a statement on ‘common
sense’ affirming, in effect, the already existing political subject of British common law,
the French deputies could make no such common appeal given the immediacy of
their absolutist heritage. In fact, the naturally free and equal individual had to
paradoxically be created by political decree,39 and in the absence of a long-term

32
With the Act of Union in 1707.
33
Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society.
34
Teschke, Myth of 1648; and Brewer, Sinews of Power.
35
See, for example, Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 131.
36
Teschke, Myth of 1648, p. 182.
37
J. C. Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1986), p. 232. Theda Skocpol and Meyer Kestnbaum ‘Mars Unshackled: the
French Revolution in World-Historical Perspective’, in Ferenc Fehér (ed.), The French Revolution
and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 17.
38
See, for example, Frances Acomb, Anglophobia in France, 1763–1789 (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1950), p. 121.
39
On these issues see Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 84–102;
François Furet, The French Revolution, 1770–1814 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 73–6; and Ferenc
Fehér, The Frozen Revolution: an Essay on Jacobinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), p. 17.
388 Robbie Shilliam

historical capitalist transformation in agrarian relations of production.40 The point is

that the French bourgeoisie did not rise to dominance through a process of enclosure
that carved out a political space of civil society. Rather, they were compelled, along
with their fellow travellers from the clergy and nobility, to find a substitute base for
the free and equal rights of man courtesy of an existing institution left over by French
absolutism.
This new home was the Third Estate, chosen by virtue of being the least privileged
existing social institution, therefore the least particularistic, therefore the most
‘naturally’ universal space within Absolutism.41 Yet such thinking ignored one
disabling factor: internally, the Third Estate was itself hierarchically differentiated.
On the one hand, it housed the ‘bourgeoisie’ – professionals of various kinds all of
which, even if inferior compared to the nobility and clergy, still held offices of
privilege. But it also, and overwhelmingly, housed the entirely unprivileged menu
peuple: the peasantry, artisans and hired workers. In other words, the bourgeoisie in
France attempted to manifest the non-differentiated political subject of natural
rights, the impersonalised individual, within an internally differentiated corporate
subject – the Third Estate.
This ‘mismatch’ led to a tension within the delineation of the political subject that
was expressed in two ways. Firstly, the regeneration of the French nation – and the
regeneration of Bourbon authority was the order of the day for the aspiring deputies
over the summer of 1789 – demanded a destruction of the parasitical First and
Second Estates, estates that had systematically stifled, during the colonial wars, the
vitality of those who comprised the tax base – the labourers and producers.42
Therefore the unfettering of the energy of these beings whose labour was useful to
both the reproduction of society and the powering of state sinews was the end that
legitimised revolutionary means.43 And secondly, but more importantly, it had been
the ‘useful’ – the menu peuple themselves – who had physically taken the battle to the
‘useless’ Estates. After all, it was the grande peur – the burning of chateaux and
destruction of records of feudal dues by peasants in the countryside – that propelled
the deputies, regardless of their estate affiliation, to regain the initiative by proclaim-
ing the new principles of sovereignty on the night of August 4th.44
Because of both these ethical and practical imperatives in delineating a new set of
rights and duties, the political subject was encoded in the revolutionary Constitution
as an antinomy. On the one hand, the citizen told the story of the free and equal
individual, whose right it was to possess and alienate property as a ‘thing’
40
On the lack of enclosure in eighteenth century France, see Robert Brenner, ‘The Agrarian Roots of
European Capitalism’, in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (eds.), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian
Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), pp. 312–13; and David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France:
the Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge, 1996).
41
See famously, Abbé Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963). See also
Brian Singer, Society, Theory and the French Revolution: Studies in the Revolutionary Imaginary
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), p. 95.
42
See for example, William H. Sewell Jr, Work and Revolution in France: the Language of Labor from
the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 78–81.
43
See Article 1 in ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’, in F. M. Anderson (ed.), The
Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1789–1907, 2nd edn.
(New York: Rusell & Rusell, 1967), p. 59, wherein the only permissible social distinction is that
based upon ‘public utility’.
44
Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 : Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (London: New
Left Books, 1973).
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 389

unencumbered by wider social duties.45 Indeed, this essentially negative expression of

rights – freedom from being socially encumbered – fitted perfectly into the bourgeois
project of levelling the corporate playing field of privilege. But on the other hand,
because both the material effecting, and the legitimacy for, the Revolution emanated
from the menu peuple of the Third Estate, the citizen had to tell his/her story too. The
‘general will’ expressed the duty to secure the social welfare of the ‘useful’ qua social
beings, not simply as ‘bearers’ of the rights of private property: Article 6 of the
Declaration claimed that law (the natural law of the impersonalised individual) was
the expression of the ‘general will’ (a political claim to social welfare that clashed with
the absolute rights of private property).46
Robespierre’s rise to power did not resolve this antinomy; rather, Jacobin policy
embraced both sets of rights and duties simultaneously and attempted to mediate
their divergent aims through the ‘vital minimum’, from which derived that infamous
regulatory tool – the ‘maximum’.47 Initially designed to set a price limit on goods of
prime necessity in May 1793, by September a general maximum had been enacted.
This led, in effect, to a ‘moral economy’ existing in the same space wherein
individuals exercised their rights to freely alienate their property.48 The maximum,
then, was no poor law as it did not act merely as an appendix to the rights of private
property: rather, the maximum directly constrained the supremacy of such rights.
In this respect, the Jacobin citizen, even if no longer embedded in absolutist
relations of personal dependency, could not express his/her natural rights as an
impersonalised individual, but only as a member of the ‘general will’.49 Therefore, the
Jacobin principle of sovereignty was necessarily contradictory because it attempted
to graft the political universality and unanimity of the impersonalised individual of
British common law onto an internally heterogeneous political collective, the Third
Estate. Because of this process of substitution, the Jacobin subject was a novel
product of the Revolution, neither the old personal corporate collective, nor the
impersonalised individual of British civil society. As a combination of both, the
‘citizen of the nation’ took the form of what I term an impersonal collective.
In fact, the French Terror was a relatively peculiar politics of constructing an
impersonalised political space in the absence of capitalist expropriation. Unlike the
British empire of civil society, the institution of private property could not underpin
the requirements for the impersonalisation of political space, namely, a universal
reach to all members of the body politic and unanimous constitution regarding the
homogeneity of the political standing of each member. For what regulated social
reproduction in Jacobin France was the maximum. And the maximum was a policy
that attempted to combine both the rights of private property and the duty to secure
the welfare of the ‘useful’. By skipping over the moment of mass expropriation of the
45
‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, p. 59, Articles 1, 2, 4, 5, 11, 17.
46
Ibid.
47
On Jacobin welfare policy see Jean-Pierre Gross, Fair Shares For All (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
48
On the maximum, see William H. Sewell Jr, ‘The Sans-Culotte Rhetoric of Subsistence’, in Keith
Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 4: The Terror
(Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994).
49
On the Jacobin sense of the ‘general will’ see for example, Alfred Cobban, ‘The Fundamental Ideas
of Robespierre’, in Aspects of the French Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968); and Norman
Hampson, ‘La Patrie’, in Colin Lucas (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern
Political Culture, vol. 2: The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press,
1988).
390 Robbie Shilliam

means of production the Revolutionaries had denied the impersonalised French body
politic any substantive social referent with which to define its conditions of
enfranchisement.
Effectively, Robespierre attempted to remedy this acute problem by providing a
substitute referent that was itself entirely abstracted from social reproduction: his
beloved social characteristic of Virtue. However, the proclamation of a Republic of
Virtue solved nothing. For virtuousness could be possessed only negatively, by
performing actions that resisted the ancien forces of personalised corporate political
subjectivity, namely privilege and particular interest.50 Yet by this definition of
inclusion into the body politic, those institutions that had initially been classified as
the outlets of expression for the ‘general will’ – the communes, the Parisian sections
of the sans-culottes, artisan corporations and so on – now came to be progressively
recategorised as factional.51 Faction was anathema to Virtue to the extent that it
invoked a particularity of political interests and thus its institutional basis had to be
destroyed. In levelling ‘faction’ the Jacobins effectively shut down the actually-
existing institutions that were providing for the social welfare of the ‘useful’ by
regulating production, distribution and exchange. And by denying the ‘general will’
on behalf of the ‘general will’, the Republic of Virtue began to destroy the very
impersonalised political space it sought to construct.
However, it was precisely these frictions ‘internal’ to the putatively unanimous
Jacobin political subject that necessarily unsettled the ‘external’ delineation of its
sovereign form. For Jacobin sovereignty, even if producing a collective subject, could
not delineate that subject through the old relations of personal dependency embed-
ded in particular lordly locale. Rather, the grounds of enfranchisement sought to
emulate the abstract nature of the impersonalised individual of British civil society.
As such, the political subject was delineated by extra-territorial qualities: virtuous-
ness, and the rights of all qua human beings. In fact, the rights and duties of the
Jacobin political subject were extra-territorial to an even greater extent: their logical
endpoint was the subsumption of all existing political authorities within one universal
community of reason made manifest on earth. Even with the imperial turn of the
Revolution, this Jacobin legacy partially remained: it was through the universally
applicable civil code that Napoleon left his greatest mark on Europe.
And this is also why the Jacobin principle of sovereignty legitimised itself in terms
far more universalistic than that of capitalist Britain. For however contradictory,
Jacobinism had nevertheless encoded the rights and duties of the political subject not
only in a formal political sense, but in relation to the structure of social reproduction
through the maximum. In short, the Jacobin sense of equality between free
individuals also ‘reached down’ to the substantive and socioeconomic realm.
Therefore the freedom and equality encoded in the Jacobin principle of sovereignty
did not speak exclusively to the European propertied or professional stratum, but to
all strata. Indeed, French Jacobinism even animated sectors of the British working

50
Fehér, Frozen Revolution, pp. 52, 60.
51
On this process, see ibid., pp. 93–96; Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution, pp. 88–90; and Singer,
Society Theory and the French Revolution, pp. 184–93.
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 391

class; and the conservative backlash in Britain was in no small sense an attempt to
stamp out this ‘enemy within’.52
Finally, this novel form of sovereignty provided the foundation of the French
‘nation in arms’. Courtesy of the centralising project begun by the Jacobins to
mobilise the ‘general will’ to defend the Republic of Virtue,53 powerful military
sinews were developed through national conscription and the development of the first
modern ‘war economy’ that geopolitically challenged both ancien régime and the
empire of civil society.54

Black Jacobins55 and Pan-Africans

The article now turns to investigate how racial identity was combined with the
Jacobin political subject – the impersonal collective – as the Revolution spread to the
French colonies, and especially to Saint Domingue.56 In this section, it is important
to remember that the principle of impersonalised individual rights was transmitted to
the Saint Domingue slave society in a form already once removed from that of the
capitalist subject due to the international dimension of social transformation that had
produced Jacobin sovereignty. In other words, the contestation over the substantive
and subjective articulation of individual freedom for Black subjects was framed by
the tensions within the Jacobin form of sovereignty elucidated above.
In Saint Domingue, the question of individual freedom and equality possessed
from the start a racial dimension. The intimate relationship between the grand blancs
(the plantation owners), the petit blancs (the ‘petty bourgeois’ of the towns), the
mulattos and the black slaves meant that one’s victory would necessarily trigger
another’s struggle.57 The mulattos, already enjoying limited personal freedoms and
the right to own property, directly lobbied the National Assembly to secure the full
extension of their natural rights.58 But if the mulattos did not immediately push for
a post-colonial transformation of sovereignty, neither, in fact, did the black slaves.
Two thirds had been born in Africa, and the majority of these had been taken from

52
See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963). On the
wider influence of Jacobinism, see Richard Saull, ‘Transforming Citizenship and Political
Community: the Case of French Revolutionary Internationalism’, in Global Society, 16:3 (2002),
pp. 245–75.
53
Clive Church, Revolution and Red Tape: the French Ministerial Bureaucracy, 1770–1850 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 94
54
See Mlada Bukovansky, ‘The Altered State and the State of Nature: The French Revolution and
International Politics’, in Review of International Studies, 25:2 (1999), pp. 197–216.
55
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Penguin, 2001).
56
For the general impact, see David Geggus, ‘Slavery, War, and the Revolution in the Greater
Caribbean, 1789–1815’, in David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (eds.), A Turbulent
Time: the French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1997), pp. 1–50.
57
On the topology of Saint Domingue, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery,
1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 167–9; Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: the Saint
Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 25; and
James, Black Jacobins, pp. 7–44. These studies form a central reference point to the following
narrative on the Saint Domingue slave insurrection.
58
See Fick, Making of Haiti, pp. 81–5.
392 Robbie Shilliam

the Kongolese coast.59 Because of this, the slaves interpreted the revolutionary
valorisation of ‘freedom’ in the main through existing Kongolese political philoso-
phies. In this discourse, freedom resolved to a right to limited autonomy granted by
the non-despotic good king.60 In the context of the plantation system, the domain of
autonomy was mapped onto small-hold farming in the slave family’s kitchen garden,
and the rights and duties pertaining to this autonomous domain of social reproduc-
tion were codified through the Voodoo religion.61 Indeed, news about the Revolution
in France was rearticulated through this ‘African’ discourse of autonomy: the
non-despotic good king had apparently abolished the whip and allowed for one extra
day of rest a week for his subjects.62
In fact, when it did come, the push to thoroughly revolutionise Haitian society
emanated from the French Jacobin side and from military necessity. With the colony
spilt between a republican north and royalist south, a French armed force, headed by
the Jacobin general Leger Felicite Sonthonax, was despatched in July 1792 charged
with re-establishing republican sovereignty over the island. But with only a 6,000-
strong force, Sonthonax soon came to realise that in order to fight the counter-
republican forces, now supported by Spain and Britain, he would have to recruit the
leaders of the various independent slave militias who were fighting for the rights of
‘African’ autonomy discussed above.63 Indeed, many black leaders at the time –
including the future leader of the Revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture – fought for the
Spanish crown in order to protect the principle of monarchical rule along with the
autonomy that the French King had apparently offered.64
It was for these reasons that on August 29th 1793 Sonthonax, acting on his own
initiative, proclaimed the emancipation of all slaves and published the decree in
Kréyole to ensure that as many slaves could read it as possible. Moreover, Toussaint
himself felt compelled to match this decree with his own similar proclamation of
political freedom to all who would follow him, else lose the initiative to this French
Jacobin.65 By 1797 an institutionalised army of free and equal ex-slaves formed the
core defence force of the French republican outpost of Saint Domingue, with an
ex-slave, Toussaint, as its Commander-in-Chief. And the political issue now was not
simply the transformation of the plantation system per se,66 but whether post-
colonial autonomy could coexist within the sovereign space of the ex-colonial master.
Toussaint, for one, believed it could. He had no wish to break from France, which
he held to be crucial both culturally and practically for the development of ex-slave
society, and was even willing to curb anti-slavery activities directed against the US for

59
Ibid., p. 25; John K. Thornton, ‘ ‘‘I am the Subject of the King of Congo’’: African Political
Ideology and the Haitian Revolution’, in Journal of World History, 4:2 (1993), pp. 183–5.
60
This is Thornton’s general point, ibid.
61
Fick, Making of Haiti, p. 32.
62
Laurent duBois, ‘ ‘‘Our Three Colors’’: the King, the Republic and the Political Culture of Slave
Revolution in Saint-Domingue’, in Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 29:1 (2003), p. 93.
63
On the African organisational roots of the slave militias see John K. Thornton, ‘African Soldiers in
the Haitian Revolution’, in Journal of Caribbean History, 25 (1991), pp. 59–80.
64
On the slaves’ appropriation of Royalism, see duBois, ‘Our Three Colors’.
65
Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, p. 218, fn. 5.
66
duBois, ‘Our Three Colors’, pp. 101–2. Indeed, the previous strategy of forming autonomous slave
communities in the colonial Caribbean – ‘maroonage’ – sought by and large to carve out
autonomous niches within the colonial system. See for example, Barbara Kopytoff, ‘Colonial Treaty
as Sacred Charter of the Jamaican Maroons’, in Ethnohistory, 26:1 (1979), pp. 45–64.
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 393

the superior goals of French geo-strategy.67 But increasingly, the only future that
post-Jacobin France considered viable was a recolonised Saint Domingue. So it was
that General Charles Leclerc arrived with a force of 16,000 soldiers in 1802 and
managed to re-embed Saint Domingue directly within the ambit of French sover-
eignty. It was, however, the still existent bands of black militias – those selfsame
groups who had initiated the slave revolt in order to pursue ‘African’ autonomy –
that, through continuous guerrilla warfare, made it impossible for Leclerc to disband
the ex-slave army. For as long as this Black army remained, the forces of
post-colonial autonomy could not be disarmed.68 When slavery was reintroduced (as
per Napoleon’s decree of May 19th) into Martinique, and then Guadeloupe, the
Black generals finally rebelled and rejoined forces with the militias. And after two
years of genocidal race wars, the French were definitively repelled.
On January 1st 1804 Jean Jacques Dessalines, the surviving leading general,
proclaimed a new independent republic – Haiti. Yet despite his hatred of the French,
Dessalines’ Constitution was necessarily Jacobin in character: after all, it was
through this principle of sovereignty that the slaves had initially been politically
emancipated, and it was republican far more than royalist forces that had supported
black freedom through the civil war (if not black independence).69 In accordance with
the Jacobin principle, the liberty and equality of all individuals was proclaimed, the
possession of property made inviolable, and a secular state assured.70 Again, in
accordance with Jacobinism, even if free from the slave relations of personal
dependency, the ex-slave could not exercise his/her natural rights as an impersonal-
ised individual. For the constitution at the same time affirmed the duty of the citizen
to defend post-colonial independence71 in order to secure the social welfare of the
‘useful’.72 In this sense, sovereignty in post-colonial Haiti was expressed, redolent of
French Jacobinism, through a political subject that took the form of an impersonal
collective.
In Haiti, however, the inherited institution of social reproduction was not the
estate system, but the plantation economy. Dessalines therefore had to effectively
substitute the milieu of ‘African’ small-hold farming for the Third Estate as that
social institution which would house the rights and duties of natural ‘man’. Because
of this, the Haitian ‘general will’ worked to secure the welfare of the ‘useful’ not qua
social beings in general, but specifically qua ex-slaves. Indeed, at independence, the
threat to the welfare of the ‘useful’ in Haiti emanated from the colonial ‘white
man’ – both ancien and republican. Dessalines launched a ‘culling’ of most whites in
Haiti, and his Constitution directly spoke to this threat for posterity: no white man

67
Robert K. Lacerte, ‘The Evolution of Land and Labor in the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1820’, in
Americas, 34 (1978), p. 453; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, p. 244.
68
Fick, Making of Haiti, pp. 248–9.
69
See also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti: State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of
Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), p. 46.
70
The 1805 Constitution of Haiti: Second Constitution of Haiti (Hayti), May 20, 1805.
〈http://www.webster.edu/wcorbetre/haiti/history/earlyhaiti/1805–const.htm〉 (accessed December
2004), Articles 3, 4, 6, 50–52.
71
Ibid., Articles 3, 9, 28.
72
For example, ibid., Article 11: ‘Every Citizen must possess a mechanic art’; and Article 21:
‘Agriculture, as it is the first, the most noble, and the most useful of all the arts, shall be honoured
and protected’.
394 Robbie Shilliam

could step foot onto Haitian soil as master or proprietor again.73 With Dessalines’
carving out of Haitian independence, the ‘general will’ now gained an additional
dimension to the strictly socioeconomic: that of race. And for the secular nation,
Dessalines’ Constitution substituted the Black nation.74 Haitian sovereignty therefore
operated through a novel principle of Black Jacobinism and spoke to the rights and
duties of an impersonal racial collective.
The crucial problem remained, however, that the Black ‘general will’ could not
match the military force of the French ‘nation in arms’, and therefore, a process of
militaristic centralisation of the structures of social reproduction, adequate to match
Napoleon’s war economy, was required. To this end, various Haitian rulers
attempted to institutionalise a system of caporalisme agraire (militarised agriculture)
that attempted to retain the plantation as the pre-eminent structure of social
reproduction instead of small-hold farming.75 To substitute for the despotic personal
relations of slavery, a series of rural codes tied ex-slaves, as formally free labourers,
to the plantations, prohibited sales and purchase of land less than a certain size, and
sometimes even outlawed cooperative ownership. Plantations expropriated from the
French (and some mulattos) as biens nationaux were passed to generals and
lesser-rank soldiers who acted as managers of production and tax collection.
But in this sense, and again reminiscent of French Jacobinism, caporalisme agraire
worked to upset the putative unanimity of the Black political subject by setting the
‘general will’ against itself. For the duty to secure the black nation against the
ex-colonial masters required a transformation in the relations of production that,
paradoxically, acted to usurp the rights of the Black menu peuple to secure their own
welfare autonomously through small-hold farming. It was through this friction that
Haitian society became progressively more stratified between the post-colonial
independence projects of the Black Jacobin strata, and the localised ‘African’
principle of autonomy fought for by the Black menu peuple.
After two decades of often outright contestation between peasantry and military-
bureaucratic elites, the pull of farmstead autonomy proved too strong, and the
plantation, as an institution of slavery, too discredited. However, this meant that to
exercise the ‘general will’ – to protect the welfare of the menu peuple – the foes of the
Black Jacobins had to be engaged with as mentors. For only colonial and
slave-owning powers could provide the technology and resources needed to effect
centralisation of the ‘sinews of power’. The problem was that the Haitian Revolution
had been received internationally with palpable fear.76 Consistently colonial and
slave owning powers (the US especially at the Congress of Panama) dared not
recognise Haitian sovereignty for fear of valorising the potential race enemy within.
And for the French, recognition, a prerequisite of bilateral relations, and that which
73
Ibid., Article 12. Apart from being rescinded in the northern part of the island during Christophe’s
reign, this principle remained in place until the US invasion in 1915.
74
Ibid., Article 14. See also David Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context: Ethnicity, Economy and
Revolt (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), p. 24. An important driver of Dessaline’s Black Nationalism
was the internal tensions that had grown between mulatto and black elites. For reasons of space I
cannot investigate these tensions here; this, however, is required of any lengthier investigation of
Black Jacobinism.
75
This policy was, in fact, started by Sonthonax. In general see Lacerte, ‘Evolution of Land and
Labor’; Mats Lundahl, ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture and the War Economy of Saint Domingue,
1796–1802’, in Beckles and Shepherd, Caribbean Freedom, pp. 2–11; and Trouillot, Haiti, pp. 43–50.
76
See for example, Anthony P. Maingot, ‘Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness of the Caribbean’, in
Gert Oostindie (ed.), Ethnicity in the Caribbean (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 53–80.
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 395

might open the door of the international ‘community’ for Haiti, was possible only if
the ex-slaves admitted that they had taken the colony unlawfully.
Yet even if this admission would work to discredit the principle of Black Jacobin
sovereignty, there was by now little alternative. Thus in 1825, Jean Pierre Boyer
accepted the French indemnity of 150 million francs. To pay this debt, moreover,
required an even greater squeeze of the peasant tax base and therefore a further
fracturing of the ‘general will’ – the duty to secure the social welfare of the ‘useful’.
Indeed, by the early 1840s, Boyer’s harsh rule had cemented the separation of
peasantry and elites: from here on, with the external threat in retreat, the army turned
into a parasitical institution, preying, again, on the Black menu peuple.77 In short,
Haiti’s international pariah status, by intensifying the internal frictions between
rights and duties, worked to tear apart the proclaimed unanimity of the impersonal
racial collective.
At the same time, however, the frictions internal to the Black Jacobin subject,
intensified by this pariah status, worked to foreclose any strict external delineation of
this subject by the territoriality of Haiti. For in the face of colonial reaction,
Dessalines reaffirmed the principle that any individual African who set foot on
Haitian soil would automatically become a free Haitian subject.78 In the coming years
Haitian rulers informally aided many an anti-slavery/anti-colonial struggle in the
Caribbean (including giving sanctuary twice to Simon Bolivar).79 Indeed, more and
more in the course of the nineteenth century the Haitian nationalist consciousness
was defined in terms of the duty to spread the rights of individual freedom to
oppressed colonial subjects worldwide.80 Later in the century formal protection was
also extended even to Amerindians arriving on Haitian shores.81
And this raises a crucial consideration of the definition of the Black political
subject. For ‘Black’ was never a category directly resolvable to the personal attribute
of skin colour: it was at the same time, and necessarily so in the context of the
plantation economy, a category of colonial exploitation. In other words, Black
incorporated both the colonially oppressed and the socioeconomic category of the
impoverished masses.82 Moreover, these categories were, in the Jacobin tradition,
abstract categories that valorised the rights of the ‘useful’ qua social beings above and
beyond delineation by particular political community. This, then, is why the rights
and duties of the impersonal racial collective could not help but stretch beyond the
territory of Haiti, and even, paradoxically, beyond individuals with African blood-
lines.
Perhaps the most surprising example of this tendency is the post-civil war
treatment of the Poles. While massacring most of the whites on the island, Dessalines
allowed Poles conscripted into the French army (along with Germans) to remain.
This was so because an opinion had developed among Haitian soldiers in the war that
Poles, as a peoples themselves colonially occupied by Germany, France and Russia,

77
Trouillot, Haiti, p. 66. The Haitian army, in light of the colonial threat, employed one in ten people
by 1840; Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and
Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 98.
78
Trouillot, Haiti, p. 117.
79
On these links, see especially Sheller, Democracy After Slavery.
80
Ibid., p. 118; Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, p. 103.
81
Ibid., p. 104; Sheller, Democracy After Slavery, p. 131.
82
For a good discussion see Trouillot, Haiti, pp. 109–31. Hence the problematical status of the
mulatto as a ‘black’ political subject.
396 Robbie Shilliam

were sympathetic to the Black cause. As ‘white Negroes of Europe’, Poles were
therefore effectively enfranchised as fellow ‘black’ citizens.83 Thus, despite possessing
a particularly personal attribute, skin colour, the Black Jacobin subject legitimised
itself in terms at least as universalistic as its French Jacobin sibling, namely the right
of, and duty to uphold, the freedom and equality of every colonised and exploited
individual.
What is more, Haiti now promoted a novel, post-colonial principle of sovereignty
that constantly worked to test the internal validity of articulations of freedom
emanating from the colonial and slave-holding metropoles. Indeed, the reading
publics of Europe, in the first couple of decades, approached the Haitian ‘experiment’
with all seriousness as the crucible in which the claims to individual freedom and
equality of the Revolution were tested.84 In this way, the Black Jacobins even cast a
comparative light back upon their colonial progenitors.
But furthermore, throughout the nineteenth century Haiti presented itself to the
Black Diaspora, and was received in hope as, the political authority that had actually
produced a Black sovereignty unproblematically unanimous and universal in scope
and application.85 For despite its internal contradictions and failures, the Black
Jacobin experiment had practically proved that the struggle to secure some kind of
post-slavery/post-colonial autonomy did not have to be bound to existing, colonially
and otherwise defined political authorities and forms of sovereignty. Rather,
contestation might now work towards manifesting a Black political subject bound to
the extra-territorial and unanimous rights and duties necessarily upheld by a racial
‘general will’.
It was this project of radical Black autonomy that vied with other race projects in
the Americas during the nineteenth century, and especially, at its end, with Booker T.
Washington’s integrationist model. But if inspired by Washington’s philosophy of
racial uplift, and if taking a lead from the nascent Pan-African projects he
encountered in Britain, Garvey’s political philosophy was rooted within the historical
Caribbean context of the Black Jacobin project.86 In fact, one of Garvey’s first
mentors, Robert Love, had lived and worked in Haiti in the 1880s, was an advocate
of land reform, and publicly lectured in Jamaica on the Haitian Revolution and
Toussaint.87 Moreover, Garvey’s own father had played an active part in the run up
to the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, helping to promote the peasants’ demands for

83
1805 Constitution of Haiti, Article 13. See also Jan Pachonski and Reuel Wilson, Poland’s
Caribbean Tragedy: a Study of Polish Legions in the Haitian War of Independence, 1802–1803
(Boulder. CO: Columbia University Press, 1986).
84
See, for example, David Geggus, ‘Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda and
International Politics in Britain and France, 1804–1838’, in David Richardson (ed.), Abolition and
its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916 (London: Frank Cass, 1985), pp. 113–40; and
Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, in Critical Inquiry, 26:2 (2000), pp. 821–65.
85
See, for example, Leon D. Pamphile, Haitians and African Americans: a Heritage of Tragedy and
Hope (Orlando, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001). Pamphile notes that those who studied
Haitian society up close became embarrassed and irritated by its internal failings (Ibid., p. 24).
86
For the general terrain of Black political thought in the Diaspora leading up to Garvey, see ibid.;
Chris Dixon, African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth
Century (London: Greenwood Press, 2000); and Geiss, The Pan-African Movement.
87
Rupert Lewis, ‘Garvey’s Forerunners: Love and Bedward’, in Race and Class, 28:3 (1987),
pp. 29–40. Garvey was directly versed in Haitian history; see Marcus Garvey, ‘African
Fundamentalism’, in Clarke, Marcus Garvey, p. 156.
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 397

redistribution of crown land. Morant Bay took its cue from the ongoing example of
Haitian independence.88
Through the UNIA, Garvey attempted to cohere a Black Jacobin ‘general will’,
one that spoke to the sovereign status of all Black political subjects regardless of their
socioeconomic status or national affiliation.89 The UNIA Declaration of Rights of the
Negro Peoples of the World affirmed the rights of the Black subject to live as a
politically free and equal individual in any political community in the world.90 Yet at
the same time such rights were embedded within the duty of all such individuals to
ensure the welfare of their fellow Black citizens, the world over, by means of either
existing ‘secular’ constitutional law or through direct intervention.91 Furthermore,
enfranchisement in this nation, via the buying of shares in the Black Star Line, was
exclusively limited to Black individuals and not to white entrepreneurs. And wherever
shares were sold to the ‘menu peuple’, local UNIA offices started to form.92 Through
this strategy, the fecundity of the fiscal base of the Pan-African nation was directly
dependent upon the enfranchisement of the ‘useful’. Thus, even if the Black subject
found freedom and equality within the parallel sovereign sphere of the UNIA, this
was not expressed as an impersonalised individual but through membership of an
impersonal racial collective.
But here, once more, a novel transformation of sovereignty occurred: for want of
a sovereign territorial base, Garvey effectively substituted membership in the
UNIA – this was the form of political authority that institutionalised the universal
rights of the Pan-African nation. Indeed, it was through the UNIA’s shipping
company – the Black Star Line – that Garvey sought to concretely establish commer-
cial and industrial links between the Black Diaspora and the African continent that
would build the ‘sinews of power’ even in the absence of sovereign territory.93 In sum,
UNIA sovereignty was expressed through a political subject that took the form of an
impersonal Pan-African collective.
Yet just as with the previous Jacobin principles of sovereignty, the rights and
duties of Garvey’s Pan-African subject betrayed a number of internal frictions.
Firstly, the powering of the Pan-African nation’s sinews rested to a significant extent
on opening up the economic potential of the African continent, a developmental
potential denied by its colonial masters. However, in making this claim, the Black
vanguard of the Diaspora implicitly affirmed the same hierarchical value system as
the white colonialists: the savage Africans had to be civilised and christianised.94
(This Black colonial discourse, incidentally, did not escape the critical attention of

88
Sheller, Democracy After Slavery, pp. 227–40.
89
See for example, Garvey ‘African Fundamentalism’, pp. 158–9. The Jacobin elements of Garvey’s
political philosophy are also evident in Marcus Garvey, ‘Governing the Ideal State’, in Robert A.
Hill and Barbara Bair (eds.), Marcus Garvey – Life and Lessons (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1987), pp. 29–31.
90
UNIA, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World’, in Cronin, Marcus Garvey,
pp. 32–3; articles 1,4,8.
91
Ibid., p. 35; Articles 35, 37.
92
Judith Stein, ‘The Ideology and Practice of Garveyism’, in Lewis and Bryan, Garvey: his Work and
Impact, pp. 204–5.
93
UNIA, ‘Manifesto of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’, in Cronin, Marcus Garvey,
p. 24.
94
Henry Paget, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000),
p. 51.
398 Robbie Shilliam

African nationalists and especially the Liberian elites.95) Furthermore, this issue of
‘top-down’ development also manifested within the Diaspora itself, specifically in the
problematical relationship between the core branches of the UNIA in the US,
especially the New York centre, and its local offices. For the duties of the local offices
were by and large perceived in terms of securing the autonomy of its members
through small-property ownership.96 Thus, redolent of the struggle over the structure
of social reproduction internal to Haiti, this localist project of autonomy stood in
direct opposition to the centralist and ‘modernizing’ tendencies required to secure
Pan-African sovereignty on a world scale.
Secondly, and relatedly, Garvey was well aware that despite mass enfranchise-
ment, the Black ‘general will’, in order to be exercised, required socioeconomically
privileged Black subjects to take the lead in terms of providing skills and capital.97 Yet
this privileging of the elite, embedded in the top-down idea of development discussed
above, came into direct friction with the proclaimed duty of the UNIA to secure the
welfare of the ‘useful’. In fact, Garvey himself proclaimed that Black capitalists could
be as exploitative of the ‘menu peuple’ as their white counterparts.98
In sum, the UNIA’s ‘general will’ was not as unanimous as it purported to be:
what notion of ‘independence’ and ‘autonomy’ did it presume, and for whose benefit?
And in the end, this familiar friction between rights and duties of a political subject
expressed as an impersonal collective worked to tear the UNIA apart. The Black Star
Line folded not only due to an opportunist and racist public prosecution of Garvey’s
business practices, but just as much, if not more so, to the inadequacy of the funds
and expertise derived from purely Black resources.99 With the collapse of the Line, no
other structure existed to materially support Pan-African sovereignty.
However, again reminiscent of Haitian Black Jacobinism, this friction, ‘internal’
to the Pan-African political subject, paradoxically worked to blur the strict ‘external’
delineation of this subject by race. For inevitably invoking both race and socioeco-
nomic status100 as extra-territorial delineations of the Pan-African subject, the UNIA
felt it politically expedient to pledge support to Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian
anti-colonial struggle.101 And reminiscent of Dessaline’s support of the Polish,
Garvey, in the opening ceremony of the first UNIA convention in 1920, read out a
telegram he had sent to another nation of white European Negroes, the Irish. The
telegram affirmed the solidarity of the Pan-African nation with the Irish indepen-
dence struggle against British colonial rule.102 It is telling that Garvey could make
such a racially counter-intuitive proclamation at such an event with such authority.
And again, the principle of Pan-African sovereignty worked to cast a comparative
light back on to the Western world. For at the same time as European heads of state

95
Jabez A. Langley, ‘Garveyism and African Nationalism’, in Race, 11:2 (1969), p. 165; Geiss, The
Pan-African Movement, pp. 271–2.
96
See especially Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society
(London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp. 223–47.
97
E. David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 184; Redkey, ‘The Flowering of
Black Nationalism’, p. 396; Edwards, ‘Garveyism’, p. 218.
98
Martin, Race First, pp. 53–4.
99
On the life and death of the Black Star Line, see Cronon, Black Moses, pp. 77–102. For a summary
of its professional ineptitude see Johnson, Black Globalism, p. 140.
100
Edwards, ‘Garveyism’, p. 217.
101
Cronon, Black Moses, p. 39; Weisbord, ‘Marcus Garvey, Pan-Negroist’, p. 422.
102
Cronon, Black Moses, p. 64.
 Marcus Garvey, race and sovereignty 399

convened in the League of Nations to discuss the sovereign principle of the

self-determination of nation-states, tens of thousands of Black subjects from around
the world convened in Liberty Hall, in Harlem, to hear the UNIA’s Declaration of
Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Moreover, even after the UNIA’s fall from
grace, the Garveyite principle of Pan-African sovereignty lived on. The Pan-
Africanist political philosophies of a number of independence leaders, Kwame
Nkrumah of Ghana especially, were formatively influenced by Garvey’s example;103
so too were the intellectuals of the Black Power movement in 1960s America,
especially Malcolm X;104 as was the Rastafarian movement, given world-wide appeal
through Reggae music.105 However, one cause perhaps more than any other
challenged the ex-colonial and ex-slave states with regards to the adequacy of their
support of the rights of the individual to political freedom and equality. The cause,
spearheaded by the ANC, an organisation itself influenced by Garveyism in its
formative years, was the overthrow of apartheid. Witness one South African writer
in the early 1930s:
The Red, the Black and the Green are the colors talked about by the young men and
women of Africa. It shall bury many and redeem millions. Today in Africa, the only hope
of our race is gospel of UNIA – is sung [sic] and said as during the period of the French
Revolution.106

Conclusion

One might, of course, point out that Garvey’s UNIA was an ephemeral political
project of relatively short duration and therefore should be treated as anomalous
rather than representative of a core component of the transformation of sovereignty
in the modern epoch. In other words, if a sovereign form ‘dies’, then it has proven
itself a failure. However, this article has attempted to show that principles of
sovereignty have consistently ‘outlived’ the historical conjunctures through which
they came to life. And this is where the issue of the lived experience of the political
subject comes to the fore. For Garvey’s project, if ‘ephemeral’, nevertheless managed
to erect an institution of social reproduction that, however imperfectly, ‘proved’ in a
very material way to living subjects and their posterity the possibility of an alternative
encoding of the political subject to that promoted by the colonial and ex-slave
powers.107 Indeed, Garvey’s project was itself framed by such historical legacies of

103
In general, see Langley, ‘Garveyism and African Nationalism’.
104
James A. Tyner and Robert J. Kruse, ‘The Geopolitics of Malcolm X’, in Antipode, 36:1 (2004),
pp. 24–42.
105
Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney (Africa World
Press, 1987).
106
Cited in Langley, ‘Garveyism’, p. 404. On Garvey’s influence upon the ANC, see Johnson, Black
Globalism, pp. 141–2; and in South Africa in general, Robert A. Hill and Gregory A. Pirio,
‘ ‘‘Africa for the Africans’’: The Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1920–1940’, in Shula Marks
and Stanley Trapido (eds.), The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South
Africa (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 209–53.
107
And of course, failure is in part a subjective assessment: how many followers of Garvey saw the
collapse of the UNIA as caused by the racist US administration and not (also) by the
organisation’s internal contradictions?
400 Robbie Shilliam

preceding Jacobin projects. Thus stated, the character of transformations of sover-

eignty in the modern epoch cannot be understood unless it is acknowledged that any
particular principle of sovereignty has developed within a world shaped by the
international dimension of social transformation – by acts of comparison and
processes of substitution.108 Historical sensitivity to such a context demands that,
rather than being rendered invisible or as curiosities in a uni-linear narrative, the
existence of the ‘marginal’ alternatives presented at the fin de siècle and their
cumulative lived experience should be taken as constitutive of the pre-existing and
ongoing multi-linear transformation of sovereignty in the modern epoch.
Invoking this past in the present, the question then becomes: what other
historically accumulated extra-territorial articulations of the rights and duties of
the political subject exist today, and how do they form a point of contrast to the
principles of ‘Westphalian’ and ‘Post-Westphalian’ sovereignty exemplified by the
EU? Of course, this is a question that cannot be answered here. Perhaps, then, it is
fitting to conclude by highlighting the normative challenge arising from the trans-
formative nature of sovereignty exposed in this article’s investigations.
At one point in the Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James contrasts the political
philosophy of Toussaint with those of Dessalines.109 Toussaint, notes James, was
convinced that the ex-slave nation had to look towards France to acquire the cultural
and logistical resources necessary to sustain their newly-won individual freedoms.
Dessalines, however, was convinced that, in order to secure that very freedom in the
first place, the Black nation had to definitively separate itself from the birthplace of
the Rights of Man. Toussaint was right, thought James . . . but Dessalines was not
wrong.
What, in fact, the Black Jacobins were struggling to overcome was the problem of
embracing a freedom that in the very act of embrace makes one un-free. In this
respect, French Jacobinism, Black Jacobinism, and Garvey’s Pan-Africanism were all
projects that attempted to negotiate the tension between the formal political
universality and unanimity of the capitalist political subject – the impersonalised
individual – and its substantive socioeconomic limits; but all did so through cumu-
latively structuring and restructuring the rights and duties of an impersonal collective
subject. In the deepest historical sense, then, was not the free and equal individual at
the same time the best hope and the heaviest handicap for all those projects above
that aimed to progressively transform iniquitous structures of social reproduction?
Was not the abstract universal and unanimous attributes of this ‘individual’, in all
cases, that which constantly required the encoding of rights and duties to be pressed
beyond an exclusivist delineation by rearticulating this individual within an imper-
sonal collective? But was not the abstract nature of this individual’s attributes that
which constantly upset such attempts to manifest a political universality and
unanimity substantively ‘on earth’? Perhaps the multiple, cumulative (yet not
necessarily homonomous) attempts to resolve this developmental challenge form the
grandest narrative through which to understand the transformation(s) of sovereignty
in the modern epoch. And one that is by no means resolved.

108
At times Linklater seems to point towards this consideration in Transformation of Political
Community (for example, pp. 123–44). However, he still treats the rise of ‘modernity’, in terms of a
homogenous form of sovereignty.
109
Black Jacobins, pp. 229–34, 259–61.