What connections are there between Britain and Haiti?
A. Between 1793 and 1798 over 20,000 British soldiers were sent to Saint Domingue (the name of the French colony that became Haiti) to put down the slave revolt and to seize the island for the British Empire. More than half of them died there from yellow fever or at the hands of the revolutionary slave army led by Toussaint Louverture. The remnants of the beaten British force withdrew in September 1798 – one of the forgotten catastrophes of Britain’s imperial history. In 1804, after the slave armies had defeated the French monarchists and republicans, and the Spanish, and British colonial forces, and Saint Domingue became the first black republic, agents of the British crown contacted the independent country’s leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. They told him that Britain would look favourably on trade and other links with Haiti if all remaining French colonists were killed. They were. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, British banks and financiers, in common with those from
