We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom.

• Author: Utietiang, Bekeh
• Position: LATIN AMERICA - Book review

Eller, Anne. We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

The history of Hispaniola is one marred by slavery, colonization, Euro-American competing interests, wars, and rebellions. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick ceded the western part of the island (Haiti) to France. In We Dream Together, Anne Eller explores the unification and separation of the island during the early nineteenth century, Spains annexation of the Dominican Republic, and the subsequent Restoration. Moving away from conventional narratives that merely focus on the conflicts in the island, the author argues that the relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is more complicated and needs to be placed in an international context.

Eller's text is separated into two main sections. The first section examines the challenge the Dominicans faced in forging a new state following liberation from Haitian rule and how this resulted in annexation, and the second section looks at post-annexation colonization and resistance. In the first chapter, Eller shows how Dominicans navigated living in the shadow of both internal...