Sweden and Haiti, 1791–1825: Revolutionary Reporting, Trade, and the Fall of Henry Christophe

Abstract:The Swedish newspaper Stockholms Posten reported twice weekly about the Haitian Revolution. A Stockholm reader would have known who Toussaint Louverture was; his name was in the paper 178 times between 1802 and 1804. Public opinion in Stockholm was mostly anticolonial. In the 1810s several Swedes were sent out from Stockholm to sell arms to independent Haiti. Their writings contain new important information on this tumultuous period. One (1821) is an especially interesting account of the fall of Henri Christophe's Northern Kingdom, and another is a firebrand treatise (1819) promoting decolonization in the Caribbean. Both Swedish and French merchants ignored the French blockade and traded under the Swedish flag with Haiti via the Swedish Caribbean colony Saint Barthélemy. In the 1810s Swedish territorial ambitions were replaced by aspirations to trade with the new American states. Sweden's relations with Haiti until the recognition in 1825 is yet another example that the narrative of Haitian post-independence isolation has been exaggerated.