Synopses & Reviews
This volume details the first slave rebellion to have a successful outcome, leading to the establishment of Haiti as a free black republic and paving the way for the emancipation of slaves in the rest of the French Empire and the world. Incited by the French Revolution, the enslaved inhabitants of the French Caribbean began a series of revolts, and in 1791 plantation workers in Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, overwhelmed their planter owners and began to take control of the island. They achieved emancipation in 1794, and after successfully opposing Napoleonic forces eight years later, emerged as part of an independent nation in 1804. A broad selection of documents, all newly translated by the authors, is contextualized by a thorough introduction considering the very latest scholarship. Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus clarify for students the complex political, economic, and racial issues surrounding the revolution and its reverberations worldwide. Useful pedagogical tools include maps, illustrations, a chronology, and a selected bibliography.
About the Author
LAURENT DUBOIS (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is associate professor of history at Michigan State University. His book
A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2004) won the American Historical Association Prize in Atlantic History and the John Edwin Fagg Award. He is also the author of
Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004), which was a Christian Science Monitor Noteworthy Book of 2004 and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2004, and
Les esclaves de la République: l'histoire oubliée de la première emancipation, 1787-1794 (1998).
John D. Garrigus (PhD, Johns Hopkins University) is Associate Professor of History and Advisor, Transatlantic History PhD Program, at the University of Texas at Arlington. A former Chateaubriand Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, he has published on pre-revolutionary Haiti in Americas, French Historical Studies, Slavery & Abolition, and the Journal of Caribbean History. He is currently working on a book on Saint-Domingue's free people of color.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Maps
PART ONE