Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an English-born political philosopher and revolutionary who was a strong advocate for the independence of 13 American colonies from Great Britain. He published his Pamphlet, Common Sense, in 1776 where he put forth the arguments behind his claim. Paine argued that it was absurd for an island to rule a Continent and that in order for America to avoid European conflicts, it needed to free itself from Great Britain’s rule. This shouldn’t be a matter of “no taxation without representation” anymore and must become something bigger. The American colonists had to capitalize on that. Also, Paine mentions distance and how far apart London and America are making it almost impossible for Great Britain to effectively govern its 13 colonies and even if they somehow are able to, they will do so for their benefit and not the Americans. that London was too far from America to rule it, and that the King and Parliament would inevitably rule for Britain’s benefit, not Americas. The book Paine is holding and pointing towards in the image is the Rights of Man, where he stresses over the legitimacy of a revolution if a ruling government isn’t capable of protecting the people’s natural rights anymore.

These views and arguments made their way to the 13 colonies and more than a decade later to France where the French Revolution took place between 1789-1799. This is where it gets interesting because as we talked about it in class, the Haitian (Saint Domingue) Revolution was not a mere effect of the French Revolution, far from it, but it was at the center of it. Saint Domingue was France’s most profitable colony and when the revolution issued “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” people in the colony began to hear about it and fear among the middle class whites grew. The document granted citizenship to free people in the colony and that was a good incentive in order to suppress revolts that were starting to erupt, but that wasn’t enough. The overthrow of the monarchy angered other European powers and they declared war on France led by Napoleon. As a way to finance the war, he tries to reestablish slavery and that didn’t sit well with the people of Haiti so they started to revolt even more. Now, it wasn’t just a matter of being a citizen of France but of your own nation and sharing similar natural rights and protections under the law such as life, liberty, and property. The French couldn’t hold on to Saint Domingue and the colony declared its independence in 1804. The events of a successful slave rebellion and decolonization of a place like Haiti was very shocking and unthinkable to many around the continent and in Europe that it was often overlooked.

History isn’t something that takes place overnight, instead it’s a compilation of events that happen over the course of a lifetime. That’s why you can’t alway pinpoint at a single origin of a revolution or war because in the grand scheme of things, it takes a network of events for them to happen. The same can be said about the Latin American independence movement even with Thomas Paine in the picture. His work and ideas might have triggered a thought that had been looming around for a while and just lacked proper execution. The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (1780) was an attempt at seeking independence that ultimately failed.

Work Cited:

• Dawson, Alexander. Latin America since Independence: A History with Primary Sources. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2022.
• Wood, James A. and Anna Rose Alexander, editors. Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations. 5th ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.