Bureaucracies were central to settler colonies, upholding the interests of dominant groups while systematically excluding native-born populations from economic, political and social power (Parker, 2015) in the Americas. Settlers implemented numerous attempts to control Black and Indigenous bodies through the use of legal restrictions, registrations, vagrancy laws (Fisher and O’Hara, 2009), and the process of blanqueamiento, a means of social whitening which attempted to ‘improve’ the race of Latin Americans. Linked to ideas of modernity in post-colonial nations (Wade, 1993), blanqueamiento forged a Eurocentric identity via the creation of elaborate racial categorisation mechanisms that favoured whites and foreigners over Indigenous and Afro-descended groups, the income-poor and women.

The island of Hispaniola, shared between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was pivotal to the bureaucratic and economic expansion of the Americas (Gómez Nadal, 2017). Since the colonial era, the island has been closely connected to globalisation and the movement of peoples (Mintz, 1966, pp. 289–331; Chamberlain, 1998, p. 1). It long ‘predate[d] the modern’ (Mintz and Price, 1985; Howard, 2017), playing an important role in the world economy and capitalist expansion. Plantation-based labour was the driving force of this colonial project which forcibly and brutally removed hundreds of thousands of people from West Africa to exploit under slavery.

White colonialism demanded Black conformity to this world system, preventing any form of agency in an attempt to destroy the Black man's sense of self (Fanon, 1952). In the West, French colonial powers profited handsomely from sugar plantation agriculture imposed in Haiti in the eighteenth century while subjecting slaves to rape, torture and extreme physical and psychological exhaustion.

Emerging from this brutal and repressive environment, the slaves fought back. A pivotal event in world history, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) represented an ‘upside-down world’ (San Miguel, 2005, p. 22) in which African slaves disrupted the global order by fighting and ultimately ousting the European colonisers occupying the island. Significantly, the Haitian Revolution resulted in the formation of the first free Black republic.