Armies prepare to fight the last war, or so the adage goes. Napoleon, for instance, won great battles attacking with tight formations of troops, and mid-nineteenth-century military leaders emulated his tactics, even as advances in bullet and rifle technology rendered them increasingly ineffective. This became brutally apparent in the American Civil War as defenders capable of shooting more quickly and accurately at longer distances decimated charging formations. The problem of predicting the nature of future wars by looking to past conflicts can be more generally summed by another adage, this one traceable to Søren Kierkegaard in 1843: life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.1

Chapter 12 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet continues the book’s exploration of cities’ role as creators and creations of the age of revolution. The revolution in Paris gave a boost to feminist movements in many Atlantic cities, movements for the emancipation of Jews that opened the gates of Europe’s ghettos, and the movement to abolish slavery. It visits colonial cities and plantations in French Saint-Domingue to follow the most radical revolution of the era – the uprising of enslaved people that resulted in the independence of a black republic of Haiti. After Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in Paris, using his armies to spread populist dictatorships to other European capitals and re-impose slavery in the Americas, he gave new impetus to abolitionism in Britain and the United States while destabilizing the centuries-old webs of imperial power that radiated from Madrid and Lisbon to Mexico City, Lima, and Rio de Janeiro. French revolutionary ideas inspired leaders based in the numerous spaces across Iberian America identified as “liberal” cities to cut those ties and found new nation states.

The Haitian Revolution (1789–1804) in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) and the African Protestant movement in the early United States coincided to produce a collective of protest literature by Black authors against the unequal treatment and inhumane bondage of Black people. Black Atlantic revolutionary literature offers a countervailing narrative to a historiography of the Haitian Revolution based on analysis from contemporary literary works by white writers. This repertoire of Black literature presents the history of expanding political and social freedoms across the Atlantic world. Black writers constructed disparate revolutionary views of freedom. In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines pursued different policies, and Julien Raimond advocated predominantly for enfranchisement of gens du couleur, free persons with African and European parentage. African American clergy Lemuel Haynes, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen looked to Christian Republicanism to end slavery, while Freemason leader Prince Hall embraced revolutionary violence as legitimate to secure Black liberation. The geopolitical triumphs of the Haitian Revolution inspired transitions in Black Atlantic literature toward resistance writing throughout the nineteenth century. The revolutionary-era collective established a literary foundation upon which later Haitian and Black American authors published works heralding the birth of an independent Black republic in the Caribbean.

Between 1791 and 1803, Santiago witnessed the arrival of more than 18,000 refugees who left neighboring Saint-Domingue in the midst of an antislavery revolution. Some among them were planter elites who wanted to recreate the plantation society that they had left. But they reached Santiago at a time when the free population of African descent had created a social and political space for themselves through alliances with a small group of political elites in Santiago. It was the combination of such alliances, marronage, and the Iberian sovereignty crisis that helped them contain the Saint-Domingue refugees’ plantation dreams. Already in the 1790s, prominent figures, such as the local bishop, complained that a plantation-based economy had a distinctly foreign quality within Santiago and that it was likely to cause social conflict. That sense was only amplified by actions undertaken by the popular sectors around 1808. Trailing in the Saint-Domingue refugees’ wake was also a new kind of rights talk to which enslaved and free people of color in Santiago were very attentive. In eastern Cuba, free people of color grafted this new talk onto Spanish legal traditions.

This chapter considers the upheavals of 1781 (The Comunero Revolution), and the decade of 1790, when authorities believed the New Kingdom of Granada was under threat by the French and Haitian Revolutions. High officials became increasingly convinced that foreign literature, foreign agents, and disloyal local vassals would seek to overthrow the Spanish monarchy to establish a republic and a system of equality. This would allegedly include the liberation of slaves, the destruction of the slave-based gold economy, and the undoing of the hierarchical, sacred order of society. However, political tensions hinged on local and regional dynamics, with many slaves seeking to advance their own interests and express their opinions in the judicial forum rather than to turn the world upside down. The chapter critically analyzes stereotypes about French influence (epitomized by the works of the Abbé Raynal) and rebellious slaves.

Historians have been slow to examine the political ramifications of the consumer revolution. Europe and the Americas experienced intense political strife in the eighteenth century, culminating in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Latin American revolutions. Did the consumer revolution (lowercase “r”) have anything to do with these political Revolutions (uppercase “R”)? This chapter provides a framework for understanding how consumer goods became implicated in revolutionary movements. It argues that activists during the age of Revolution politicized consumer goods in three ways. First, by protesting against the “despotic” commercial regulations and consumption taxes at the heart of imperial political economies, activists politicized colonial goods, such as tea and tobacco. They demanded that such “necessities” circulate freely and at low cost. Second, citizens imbued everyday objects with revolutionary meaning. Material objects like the tricolor cockade mediated revolutionary ideas and aspirations, enabling citizens to participate in and express their allegiance to (or rejection of) evolving political projects. Finally, consumer activism shaped debates on slavery. The enslaved of Haiti launched the era’s greatest attack on slavery, overthrowing a brutal system of production that provided Europeans with large quantities of colonial products. Further, abolitionists in Europe and North America protested slavery by abstaining from slave-produced sugar. They argued that consumers had the power to effect large-scale change through a new mode of collective action: the boycott.

This chapter traces the socio-economic dimensions of rights development in the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The author argues that, in the context of this revolution, which began with a revolt against slavery but became an anti-colonial struggle for independence, the conceptual separation of civil and political rights, on the one hand, and socio-economic rights, on the other, makes little sense. The story of the birth of the world’s first black republic reveals the co-dependency of socio-economic rights and citizenship rights in a struggle for liberation and dignity. The intertwined nature of citizenship and socio-economic justice is examined across several documents, including the 1801 Constitution of Saint-Domingue and the 1805 Imperial Constitution of Haiti, as well as other texts written by the revolutionaries themselves. The chapter suggests that, rather than date the advent of socio-economic rights to the twentieth century, historians should look for the socio-economic stakes of prior struggles over civil and political rights and the ways in which certain protagonists in those struggles tried to suppress them.

The American Revolution, and the principles of liberty and equality which it was believed to have embodied, precipitated a wave of revolutions in France, Haiti, and Spanish America which occurred over the roughly fifty-year period between 1775 and 1825. In each of those revolutions, slaves pushed for freedom and equality, and they often rebelled, the clearest indication of their refusal to accept the inhumanity of chattel slavery. Enslavers feared slave insurrection, and they worked diligently to tighten control over slaves. Although large-scale rebellions became less likely to succeed during the Age of Revolutions, slaves throughout the Atlantic World continued to resist their oppressors. Slaves relied on an extensive communication network, and they were well aware of the revolutions and independence movements transpiring in the Atlantic World.

This chapter explores the projection of passions and feelings in master–enslaved relations and the role of this projection in the development of body politics and power relations in the empires of the Atlantic world. The chapter recognizes links between ideas about emotions and the genocidal violence of Atlantic slavery. Particular attention is paid to the representation of enslaved resistance as a “passionate transgression,” focusing on the Haitian Revolution as a case study.

French Revolutionary principles and mobilization methods radicalized colonial Saint-Domingue (the future Haiti) even more profoundly than France itself. The collapse of absolutism set all factions in competition – leading to standoffs between elite planters and gens de couleur (free men of color) over voting rights, while conflicts between French abolitionists and colonial lobbyists also destabilized the social order. All sides, however, sought to mobilize social movements along recent revolutionary lines – organizing corresponding societies to make their pressure felt. The slave revolt that began the Haitian Revolution erupted amid near-civil war, as the fundamental questions of the era could not be contained by the small, repressive elite that had long controlled the colony.

Haiti had a singular importance in the life of Frederick Douglass. Like countless other African Americans, Douglass upheld the Haitian Revolution as an unprecedented blow for human rights. He appreciated the symbolism of Haiti, a self-identified Black nation-state. As an abolitionist, Douglass used his platform to call on the United States to grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti and opine on the proposed mass emigration of African Americans from the United States to Haiti. He, after declining an opportunity to visit Haiti at the outset of the Civil War, eventually went there as a U.S. diplomat from 1889 to 1891. In Port-au-Prince, Douglass played a key role in a diplomatic conflict between the United States and Haiti. His experience in Haiti would not only lead to his appointment as one of Haiti’s representatives at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair but also have a significant impact on his political thought.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as a human right. There is first a brief general review of a few relevant philosophical debates about human dignity and human rights that are concerned with societal progress in the way karama as a human right, was sometimes interpreted by protesters. Then, the chapter moves on to a closer look at a postcolonial review of similar debates. After reviewing some relevant passages from interviews and other expressions of karama as a human right in Egypt, the chapter ends with an overall analysis of this specific theme in light of the material previously presented.

“Shadows of Haiti” examines echoes of the Haitian Revolution in three texts from the extended Caribbean: Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre,”, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab, and Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand F.M.C. After an overview of world-systems theory and an introduction to the historical context in which each of these texts is situated, this chapter compares the ways in which the potentially violent revolt of a mixed-race heterosexual male protagonist is neutered or silenced by the conventions of sentiment. Haunting all three texts is the dark shadow of the violent revolt in Saint-Domingue, enmeshed with the consequences of deadly family secrets related to race and violence. In “Le Mulâtre” and Sab, the male protagonist dies. In Paul Marchand F.M.C, however, the hero survives but is silenced and forced into exile in France.

Marlene Daut’s chapter focuses on Haiti as diasporic crossroads and argues that Haiti is both a geographical and an intellectual meeting place for African American writers at mid-century. For Daut, the stakes are at least twofold, one being to acknowledge African American writing as transnational, thereby altering the geography of American literature, and, second, what the Americas come to be when the Haitian Revolution appears at the center, as it did for these writers. The result, she argues, is to “expose the inherent Africanness of all American literature,” to consider African American literary tradition as multiple and linked to spaces beyond the nation, and finally to understand all American literature as diasporic, as determined not by borders and the geopolitical they assert but “by people and their movements.” In doing so, Daut examines Martin Delany’s Blake, Oneida Debois’s oratory, George Vashon’s and Pierre Faubert’s poetry, the first-known Trinidadian novel by Maxwell Phillip, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, “St. Domingo, Its Revolutions and Its Patriots,” John Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Baron de Vastey’s Réflexions, and the work of James McCune Smith and Henry Bibb.

This chapter examines the publication of “Theresa” in Freedom’s Journal, a short story about women’s wartime heroism into the broader history of the Haitian Revolution. “Theresa” paints an image of mixed-race womanhood that was not insignificant for both this American venue and for a larger transatlantic context. Like the anonymously written British epistolary novel, The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1808), “Theresa” shows mixed-race women who are aligned with Black racial uplift rather than white assimilation. Moreover, both of these texts present images of mixed-race heroines who differ significantly from those of the “tragic mulatta” genre that would gain popularity during the antebellum period. Instead, “Theresa” frames its mixed-race heroines as models not only of racial solidarity but also of radical abolitionist action. In this, “Theresa” anticipates postbellum mixed-race heroines, through foregoing mixed-race women’s heterosexual union with Black men with their political action alongside them. The chapter offers an analysis of early nineteenth-century texts such as Laura Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) and Zelica the Creole (1820), which make the safety of white women the priority of their mixed-race characters.

Often Haiti is understood as the central Black revolutionary touchstone for the time, and though Stephen Gilroy Hall examines the ways in which African American writers such as James McCune Smith, William Wells Brown, and George Vashon presented Haiti as “offering instructive lessons about the possibility” of revolution, he also considers the way in which Haiti was activated alongside the American Revolution through the writings of William C. Nell. Importantly, these writers turned to revolutionary pasts as interventions in their historical present when the threat of slavery’s expansion made for what Hall calls “an antislavery war” waged in African American historical writing.

Since the West Indies saw the forced introduction of the most enslaved Africans in all of the Americas, the most written about element of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean writing in contemporary scholarship is without a doubt plantation slavery, including abolition and slave revolt and rebellion. However, even while drawing attention to these concerns, much of nineteenth-century Caribbean writing, in the works of Cuba’s Félix Varela, Haiti’s Émeric Bergeaud, and Puerto Rico’s Ramón Emeterio Betances, for example, also shows distinct concerns with ideas of sovereignty. Rather than illustrating an obsessive concern with racialized revolution or at once idyllic and treacherous scenes of tropical paradise, the Caribbean writers under discussion in this essay demonstrate a clear shift towards trying to determine the meaning of freedom in a life after slavery, and what kinds of new identities the inhabitants of a post-slavery Caribbean might take on.

This essay examines the Caribbean as a conflicting node of representation in essays, editorials, stories, and poems in three newspapers owned by Fredrick Douglass and one part-owned by Jamaican John Russwurm that were published in the USA between 1827 and 1874. The shifting and contradictory nature of this representation, ranging from the emancipated Caribbean’s role as a beacon in a ‘discourse of humanity’, to endorsement of US annexation plans as empire solidified, are a direct function of the constriction or widening of African American material space during the period. The condition of being enslaved yielded a different Caribbean-ward affect from the condition of being freedpeople, and the condition of being freedpeople yielded yet a different affect as the dream of black citizenhood emerged in the US post-emancipation era. The trajectory was one of alienation which resonates in African American-Caribbean literary relations today. Reflections are invited on the rise of national imaginaries and literatures across the African diaspora.