The Haitian Revolution: Slavery, Freedom, and the Atlantic World

How did the French colony of Saint-Domingue become Haiti, the world's first Black-led republic? What did Haiti symbolize for the African diaspora and the Americas at large? What sources and methods do scholars use to understand this history? To answer these questions, this course covers the Haitian story from colonization to independence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our course will center Africans and people of African descent, both enslaved and free, as they negotiated and resisted systems of racial and economic oppression in the French Caribbean. Our inquiry will critically engage with conceptions and articulations of human and civil rights as they relate to legal realities and revolutionary change over time, as well as the interplay between rights and racial thinking. Tracing what historian Julius Scott called the "common wind" of the Haitian Revolution, we will also investigate how the new nation's emergence built on the American and French Revolutions while also influencing national independence movements elsewhere in the Atlantic World. Priority given to history majors and minors; no prerequisites and all readings are in English.