#haitian revolution
January 1, 2018 marked the 214th observation of Haitian Independence Day, which celebrates the culmination of a 12 year struggle by self-liberated former slaves against French colonial rule in the country then known as Saint-Domingue. The Haitian Revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the creation of a state, and challenged long-held perceptions about race and slavery across the Americas.
Within our collection is Lettre des Commissaires des citoyens de couleur en France à leurs frères et commettans dans les îsles françoises, a pamphlet written by the Citoyens de Couleur en France (Citizens of Color in France) on June 10, 1791, just before the storm of revolution broke. The pamphlet, addressed to both the white and black citizens of Saint-Domingue, celebrates the French National Assembly’s decree of May 15, 1791, which extended political rights to persons of color born of free parents, and outlines the proper response to the decree. The pamphlet encourages working hard, trusting the law to take care of injustice, and treating slaves more fairly. Despite the hopes of the writers, tensions in Saint-Domingue worsened, with increased conflicts between white colonists and free black citizens, and eventually erupting in the massive slave revolt of August 21, 1791.
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I really hate it when fiction, when trying to be gritty and establish that their setting is free of frippery, or the land is super duper poor, etc, will say that the currency, rather than being gold or silver, is like ‘iron’ or ‘steel’ when like…
leaving aside the fact that iron rusts and such, it’s also… well, useful. You have better things to do with Iron then stuff it in a vault. Make shit out of it.
Gold? Pretty much only use for gold other then money (until we started using it in computer chips and stuff) is to sparkle. You can’t use it for much beyond a store of value.
There’s a reason why human society picked gold, and not something else.
I think they’re usually trying for a medieval-fantasy version of “bullets are currency”, seen in some post-apocalyptic settings.
And copper and bronze coins were used in Bronze Age societies, so there is a precedent for using the same thing for money as for making weapons and tools out of. (Copper and bronze are a lot easier to work than iron, though, so it’s easier to convert your currency into usable material.)
Apparently China sometimes used iron coins in place of copper, when copper was too expensive—like making ammunition with steel casings instead of brass.
Didn’t Sparta have iron currency?
Apparently that is either a fabrication or a legend, in Plutarch (he attributes the use of iron coins to Lycurgus but Lycurgus lived before Greece had any coins), or else someone, Plutarch or his source, misunderstanding “cooking spits” (obeloi) as “coins” (oboloi)—I think the words are related, and it’s possible that Spartans used cooking spits as a convenient unit of account given the communal feasts were central to their culture. Certainly, though, trading with others, Spartans used the same coins as the rest of Greece.
I would suspect Sparta’s main internal exchanges were barter, given the tightly controlled command economy; since almost every working person in Sparta was a slave (mostly state-owned helots but also privately-owned slaves like in the rest of Greece) or a free noncitizen protegee of one of the elite (Sparta’s only citizens were its nobles), there was no real need for a medium of exchange beyond the goods those slaves and protegees would give their elite masters and patrons, who could relatively conveniently just move the goods around among themselves.
The weird thing about the Spartan economy is it was illegal for the elite to have sources of revenue besides their state-allotted farmland, and an elite who could no longer afford to contribute to the aforementioned communal feasts was permanently stripped of status. (There was no way to rejoin the elite class, or otherwise enter it from outside, which meant its numbers permanently declined.)
Interesting. You learn something new every day, I guess.
That last bit about the elites seems like an extremely short-sighted system.
Oh, it was. One of the things that led to the downfall of sparta was how small the elite warrior class was getting. But the notion was to try to keep all the citizens equal to prevent like, class conflict or something within the elite that the slaves would take advantage of. So it came from a place that made sense.
We have to remember that in Sparta, the slave to citizen ratio was insane, like 7 to 1, according to Herodotus. You don’t get numbers like that anywhere else until the Carribean Sugar plantations. And given how it turned out for the French in Haiti, the Spartans were right to be paranoid about that.*
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*For reference, the Haitian revolution was presaged by a conflict within the white planter class against France that eventually cracked the system wide open and allowed the slaves to take over, winning legal freedom/citizenship within the French Republic (since this was happening at the same time as the French Revolution) in the process, and then later full on Independence thanks to Napoleon being a complete idiot about Haiti and L'Ouverture.
