The Haitian Revolution of 1789–1803 transformed the Caribbean's wealthiest colony into the first independent state in Latin America, encompassed the largest slave uprising in the Americas, and inflicted a humiliating defeat on three colonial powers. In Haitian Revolutionary Studies, David Patrick Geggus sheds new light on this tremendous upheaval by marshaling an unprecedented range of evidence drawn from archival research in six countries. Geggus's fine-grained essays explore central issues and little-studied aspects of the conflict, including new historiography and sources, the origins of the black rebellion, and relations between slaves and free people of color. The contributions of vodou and marronage to the slave uprising, Toussaint Louverture and the abolition question, the policies of the major powers toward the revolution, and its interaction with the early French Revolution are also addressed. Questions about ethnicity, identity, and historical knowledge inform this essential study of a complex revolution.

These essays deepen our understanding of Haiti during the period from 1791 to 1815. They consider the colony's history and material culture as well as it 'free people of colour' and the events leading up to the revolution and its violent unfolding.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic History, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of Atlantic History, the study of the transnational interconnections between Europe, North America, South America, and Africa, particularly in the early modern and colonial period. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

"This anthology brings together a transnational selection of literature, some translated into English, about the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), from the beginnings of the conflicts that resulted in it to the end of the nineteenth century. It includes contextualizing headnotes and footnotes"--

"Stimulating, incisive, insightful, sometimes revisionist, this volume is required reading for historians of comparative colonialism in an age of revolution." —Choice "[An] eminently original and intellectually exciting book." —William and Mary Quarterly This volume examines several slave societies in the Greater Caribbean to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutionary age on the region. Built precariously on the exploitation of slave labor, organized according to the doctrine of racial discrimination, the plantation colonies were particularly vulnerable to the message of the French Revolution, which proved all the more potent because it coincided with the emergence of the antislavery movement in the Atlantic world and interacted with local traditions of resistance among the region's slaves, free coloreds, and white colonists.

The events leading to the abolition of slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1793, and in France.

The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written work produced at the time, by Haitians? This book is the first to present an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Revolutionary era. Beyond the Slave Narrative shows the emergence of two strands of textual innovation, both evolving from the new revolutionary consciousness: the remarkable political texts produced by Haitian revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and popular Creole poetry from anonymous courtesans in Saint-Domingue's libertine culture. These textual forms, though they differ from each other, both demonstrate the increasing cultural autonomy and literary voice of non-white populations in the colony at the time of revolution. Unschooled generals and courtesans, long presented as voiceless, are at last revealed to be legitimate speakers and authors. These Haitian French and Creole texts have been neglected as a foundation of Afro-diasporic literature by former slaves in the Atlantic world for two reasons: because they do not fit the generic criteria of the slave narrative (which is rooted in the autobiographical experience of enslavement); and because they are mediated texts, relayed to the print-cultural Atlantic domain not by the speakers themselves, but by secretaries or refugee colonists. These texts challenge how we think about authorial voice, writing, print culture, and cultural autonomy in the context of the formerly enslaved, and demand that we reassess our historical understanding of the Haitian Independence and its relationship to an international world of contemporary readers.