The Haitian Revolution

CHAPTER 5 · 1791–1804 · The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848

Return to the Caribbean and look at the small territory that just turned red: the only successful slave revolution in recorded history, and the age’s most radical event. In 1789 Saint-Domingue is France’s treasure — half a million enslaved people (two-thirds African-born), producing roughly half the Atlantic world’s sugar and coffee under a labor regime so lethal the population must be constantly re-imported. Into this arrives the vocabulary of Paris: rights, nation, citizen. The free people of color claim it first and are refused; then, on the night of 14 August 1791 at Bois Caïman, the ensla

The turn: Vertières, 18 November 1803.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.