This paper uses the boycott of sugar following the Haitian Revolution to illustrate how symbolic orders shape material histories. The authors introduce reflexive decoloniality as a critical model for students, practitioners and researchers of marketing history. When seen through a reflexive decolonial lens, these boycotts can be reinterpreted as framing colonial dominance in more acceptable forms rather than the liberatory movements historically portrayed.
The symbolic designation of sugar as white gold attests to its racialized history. The methodological standpoint of double-consciousness we espouse seeks to reframe the historical portrayal of boycott movements not as emancipatory, but rather as further instances of reified colonial dominance. The racial politics of respectability recasts the civility of European domestic proprieties as inhumanity by differentiating visible from invisible persons. The juxtaposition of French and Haitian accounts of revolutionary boycott shows the importance of critical theory for assessing epistemic inconsistencies in canonical research. The standpoint of endogenous Africana historiography centers on subaltern voices excluded historically. The comportment of reflexive decoloniality unites these disparate double-conscious perspectives to disclose the systemic injustice of overlapping marketing systems for enslaved persons and sugar.
Consumers leading the 1792 and 1793 Paris riots over price speculation showed a willful ignorance of the contiguous Haitian Revolt as the reason for decreased supply and increased costs. The unique role of women in these boycotts accentuates how sugar shifted from domestic luxury to necessity, to a symbol of Jacobin ideals.
Since the authors also see this project as requiring the dismantling of the stranglehold on power at all institutional levels, they must concede the limits of this project in not adequately addressing the next steps forward for Haiti, facing systemic ecological challenges as a consequence of centuries of colonial material exploitation. Foreign policy relations with its neighboring Dominican Republic have led to undeniable conditions of modern agrarian slavery. The same Haitians who once achieved liberation from colonial exploitation are subjected to the original double dilemma of neo-colonial dependence paired with the new iterations of agricultural bondage.
The historical focus on sugar shows how global supply chains functioned in a colonial network of exchange. Similar consumer boycotts emerge in fair trade efforts to eliminate modern slavery from other agricultural commodity markets, such as chocolate and coffee.
Lessons from the history of sugar show how the socio-politics of nation-building draw on the symbolic import of domestic cultures of consumption.
At the bicentennial anniversary of Haitian independence, even the 1825 date of conferred recognition came at the cost of paying reparations for French material losses. The novel introduction of reflexive decoloniality argues that the forging of a distinctively Haitian national identity was achieved through the boycott of the entire colonial marketing system.
