The Impact of the Congress of Vienna on Caribbean Politics and Society

For the hundreds of international delegates gathered at Vienna two hundred years ago, the focus of attention was, understandably, (as we have heard so many times,) the reconstitution of the European political frontiers severely altered during the French Revolutionary military campaigns between 1794 and 1814. The Napoleonic changes affected far more than just geographical boundaries and nominal administrations. There was also a major change in general mentality and political discourse, reflected in the comments of the English-Jamaican planter Bryan Edwards to his colleagues in the British Parliament in 1798: The times in which we live will constitute an awful period in the history of the world; for a spirit of subversion has gone forth, which sets at nought the wisdom of our ancestors and the lessons of experience. Edwards was obviously bemoaning threats to his comfortable way of life, but his lament would become relevant for all societies from that time

! MEMORIAS REVISTA DIGITAL DE HISTORIA Y ARQUEOLOGÍA DESDE EL CARIBE COLOMBIANO related to the wider non-European world -and that situation would continue for at least the next generation.
And fewer of the delegates at Vienna had any idea how to draw up generally acceptable plans to efficaciously address the disconcertingly new realities of a changed and One concern was obviously to prevent the return of Napoleon Bonaparte to power in France. The other concern was to roll the clock back as far as feasible to restore the status quo that existed before 1789. Many delegates, however, accepted that that was an impossible task, the more so given the mutual suspicions and private ambitions that prevailed among some delegates. After all, the overthrow of Napoleon did not effectively 5 end the zealous appeal of the contagious bourgeois ideas that were slowly spreading across the Atlantic world, nor did it satisfy the territorial ambitions of some of the major players such as Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia.
These Eurocentric preoccupations of boundaries and status at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 overshadowed the vast enormous changes that were taking place in the wider world.
The Atlantic World was transiting between mercantilism and bullionism on the one hand and free trade and industrial capitalism on the other. Imperialism made an indelible imprint on all trading societies and consequently on markets everywhere. European problems had become inextricably linked with overseas problems as parts of those overseas empires manifested an irresistible urge to create new nation states. Therefore, the problem at Vienna concerned restraining imperial reform and controlling imperial disintegration in such an effervescent age. 6 Of course, such political reforms and imperial disintegration began long before the French Revolution and would continue long after the members of that famous Congress left King, Vienna, 1814, pp. 263--268. 5 Manuela Albertone and Antonio De Francesco, editors, Rethinking the Atlan=c World: Europe and America in the age Hobbes' Leviathan (1685) -to the middle of the nineteenth century. As indicated before, the progressive transformation ushered in a new age as well as a new mentality with a new political discourse closely linked to economic self-interest.
One has only to recall how Guillaume Thomas François, the Abbé Raynal, began his six- only an event but also a process. There is much written about revolutions as events.
There is far less written about revolutions as a process. Nevertheless, the concept appears in works by Crane Brinton and R. R. Palmer and others who have explored the theoretical aspects of revolution. 12 By 1814, the revolutionary process had been going on for more than a hundred years. It  In the France of the 1780s the political Estates enjoyed a long political tradition based on a social hierarchy that was closely related to genealogy and hallowed by antiquity. It was a profoundly unequal system of power distribution that discriminated most against the increasingly wealthy urban bourgeoisie. The colonial dimension introduced a baffling 18 complexity compounded by semantic inadequacy when the Estates tried to accommodate the colonial representatives and precisely define French citizenship in 1789.
For many reasons any imperial system -or any constellation of power units for that matter -will always generate continuous tension between the center and the periphery. This was especially so when distance produced an inevitable time lag in communications. Often, administrators at the periphery were forced to take local decisions before they could get  In the first place the cahiers de doléances from the colonies overwhelmingly represented not views from a cross-section of the population as they did in France but rather from a few wealthy plantation owners and middling merchants, a number of whom were absentees resident in the metropolis. Moreover, as the French were to find out 21 eventually, the colony of Saint-Domingue was unusually complex not only geographically but also demographically. The three provinces clearly illustrated the befuddling complexity of people and production.
The entire free population constituted a minority of the colony. The wealthy, articulate mainly expatriate sugar producers of the Plain du Nord, were a distinctly small numerical minority within this small free minority. For those large producer-exporters the issues of slavery as well as free commerce were important considerations. The interests and preoccupations of the middling commercial sorts and petit bureaucrats from West Province in the center of the colony and the mainly free coloreds from South Province were vastly different. West Province had a number of small towns with small mixed-product farmers and white urban commercial types who sincerely believed that they were true citizens by virtue of the color of their skins as well as the fact of many having been born in France.
Coffee dominated the economy of South Province and supported a growing number of affluent and well-educated free non-white persons whose claim to citizenship was based on their personal wealth and high culture.

Locally the colonists divided themselves into grands blancs, petits blancs, gens de couleur
and esclaves (slaves), reflecting their relationship to production as much as their color, Petits blancs stressed equality, an active citizenship for all white persons, not just wealthy property owners. They also wanted less bureaucratic control over the colonies and the continued subordination of all non-whites. Their fraternity was based on a whiteness of skin color that they assumed to signify genuine French-ness.
For gens de couleur the principal issues were the equality and fraternity of all free people regardless of skin color since in every respect they fulfilled all other qualifications for active citizenship. This position approximated a general declaration of basic human rightsexcept that it overlooked the vast majority of the population who were enslaved.
Discourses on liberty whether in France or overseas could not be separated from a number of other considerations that involved race, color, condition and economic activity. At first, the enslaved were not a part of the sloganeering and public discourse, but from their subsequent actions, especially after August 1791, they clearly supported liberty.
However, it was not the narrow and nuanced self-serving liberty of the upper-sector whites, but a personal freedom that, if implemented, threatened to undermine their relationship with their masters as well as the plantation structure, thus jeopardizing the wealth of a considerable number of all those who were legally free. External threats had forced France to focus its attention at home as it rapidly became a nation in arms after 1794. It eventually lost its rich colony of Saint-Domingue along with By 1830, France was the major beet grower in the world and the neighboring Germanic states were major beet sugar producers.

Conclusion
In the final analysis the impact of the Congress of Vienna, while not altogether unimportant for the Caribbean, was not germane to the ongoing changes in politics, society and economy that were taking place across the region. Still, the fact that Britain, France and Spain were major colonial powers meant that their negotiations before and during the 5. Free trade diversified commerce and so banking systems had to be introduced across the Caribbean to handle the local monetary requirements, especially as the labor systems changed from slave labor to wage labor. Paper money and tokens became an important aspect of this diversified commercial system. 35 6. Finally, the expansion of beet sugar production (beginning with the continental blockade of the Napoleonic Wars) significantly changed the world sugar market during the nineteenth century. Sugar beet was a temperate climate crop with a much shorter growing season than the tropical sugar cane. Moreover, sugar beet was a crop that more efficaciously complemented cereal and dairy production than sugar cane. In the long run, sugar beet would become the serious rival to sugar cane on the world sugar market until the middle of the twentieth century when both yielded to artificial sweeteners.
For these reasons, 1814 does not appear as one of the significant dates in Caribbean history.