The World of the Haitian Revolution

Students of Haiti's past have seen two recent additions in English to the literature about the island's famous revolution-first the magisterial Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, by Madison Smartt Bell in 2007, (CH, Jul'07, 44-6405), and now the worthy The World of the Haitian Revolution. The latter is the fruit of a 2004 conference at the John Carter Brown Library commemorating the bicentennial of Haitian independence. Eighteen articles range from studies about Saint-Domingue on the eve of the 1791 slave insurrection to the transition from emancipation to the permanent break with France in 1804, and, finally, to the reverberations of the island's events upon other slave societies and upon fiction, the fine arts, and the craft of history. The most interesting articles question the inevitability of the Haitian Revolution, explore the French decision to treat the Haiti troubles in the same fashion as that of the peasant revolt in the Vendée, analyze the court cases for emancipation brought by Haitian exiles in the US legal system, and discuss the historic sites of revolution. Some scholars are edging toward an argument that the most important of the New World revolutions took place in the Caribbean and not on the mainland. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. - Choice