During the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, the major Atlantic empires confronted, and in several cases succumbed to, movements for national independence in the Americas. The political defeats in the Americas overlapped with, and sometimes drove, the painfully slow elimination of the Atlantic slave trade, though slavery itself survived in one form or another in all the independent American republics except for one. They also overlapped with – and informed, both as sources of inspiration and as warnings – the beginnings of territorial expansion into Africa and Asia. Events in all the Atlantic empires shaped each other profoundly as well. These overlapping and interconnected historical turning points can only be understood in relation to one another, and yet one must also seek to untangle them in order to understand the various forces at work in the reconfiguration of empire during the period.

Haiti, France and the Americas

The French Atlantic empire was thriving in the late eighteenth century, chiefly through the immense productivity of its Caribbean colonies. And it was there, particularly in its most important colony of Saint-Domingue, that this empire was challenged, transformed and, ultimately, largely undone. As a result, the French presence in the Americas diminished substantially, not in territorial terms, since the land held by France in the late eighteenth century was in fact quite small, but in economic and political terms.