This chapter offers a complex reframing of the Haitian Revolution by placing royalism, rather than republicanism, at the center of its intellectual and political history. Using the 1791 killing of Colonel Mauduit as a point of departure, it argues that royalism functioned as a transimperial framework through which Black and white subjects negotiated legitimacy, reciprocity, and belonging. Situated within broader eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistemologies of race, the chapter shows how insurgent royalism unsettles teleological narratives that equate modernity with republicanism and whiteness. Haiti’s revolution, shaped by African, French, and Spanish monarchical traditions, exposes the instability of racial categories and challenges prevailing accounts of “progress” in the Atlantic world. By foregrounding royalism as an analytical lens, the essay offers a more capacious reading of race, governance, and political imagination in the Age of Revolutions.

The historically overlapping discourses of romanticism and aesthetics frequently draw criticism for being mere ideology. “Ideology” here refers to a restricted worldview that misrecognizes itself as universal and suggests why romanticism is crucial to debates about world literature. Insisting on aesthetics as universal, romanticism helps to initiate a Eurocentric conception of world literature. But this criticism ignores the often-conflicted character of romantic writing in which an aesthetic machinery exposes universalism as built on exploitation. To fully grasp the stakes of such breakdowns one must further consider romantic-era texts that are not European. An exemplary instance is Hérard Dumesle’s 1824 political travel narrative Voyage dans le Nord D’Hayti. Drawing on European models, it proves paradoxically revealing in its account of Eurocentric aesthetics. Endorsing and ironizing universalism, it opens onto alternative conceptions of world literature by marking the limits of translatability and refusing to belong to any one world.

The first decade of the nineteenth century was a crucial period in the development of Haiti and Black identity in the Caribbean. This chapter focuses on the first half of the decade: L’Ouverture’s reign during the abolition of slavery, his capture and exile, and Dessalines’s declaration of Haitian independence. I trace evolving attitudes towards architectural destruction and renovation, focusing on three stages: uncertainty about violence; creolization, mimicry, and renovation; and acceptance of the obliteration of the architectural archive as an anti-colonial act. Drawing on texts by Romantic authors including John Thelwall, William Wordsworth, Marcus Rainsford, and Leonora Sansay, I recover how Romantic ideology and revolutionary practice were not merely transmitted across the Atlantic then passively accepted in the Caribbean. Haitians actively adapted and complicated Romantic and revolutionary ideology, using the common tropes of the period to reimagine their place in the world and assert their rejection of objectification and colonialism

Haiti was a remarkably constant presence in Carpentier’s life and its imprint on his narrative fiction and essays has been profound, far-reaching, and indelible. Carpentier’s fascination with Haiti begins with his first novel, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933), culminates in The Kingdom of This World (1949) and resurfaces within the transatlantic context of the French Revolution in yet another major work, Explosion in the Cathedral (1962). While traces of Haiti appear in myriad formal and conceptual manifestations throughout Carpentier’s oeuvre, in this essay I suggest that the notion of the Plantationocene, forged by Donna Haraway and Donna Tsing, carries significant critical potential for refocusing Carpentier’s links with Haiti in a manner that is both transdisciplinary and cross-historical.

What was the American Revolution? More importantly, what wasn’t it? In the years following the independence of the United States, Americans thought through these questions alongside contemporary events shaking the foundations of the global imperial order. As revolutions gripped Ireland, France, Saint-Domingue, Poland, and elsewhere in the late eighteenth century, Americans began to wonder whether their own revolution was one among many radical attacks on global tyranny or if it was an unusually orderly event that deviated from other revolutions’ drift toward anarchy and terror. By the end of the 1790s, white Americans largely recognized that the American Revolution was fundamentally unlike the Haitian or French Revolutions. Yet for many decades to come, Black Americans held on to a more radical, expansive vision of the American Revolution that tied it to the legacy of the radical revolutions of the late eighteenth century.

Movement and the freedom to move are concepts intertwined with the origins and impact of the American Revolution. This chapter views the Revolution and the decades that followed through the lens of those concepts to examine whether that conflict sparked new opportunities for physical movement to, from, and within the newly established United States. To do so it explores the experiences of Loyalists, African Americans, immigrants, citizens, and Native Americans within a thematic framework that identifies the forces and actions altering the dynamics of power, ideology, and policy from the Atlantic seaboard to the trans-Mississippi West from the 1780s to the 1810s. Those diverse experiences demonstrate that the freedom to move was inextricably intertwined with efforts to define the meaning of “we the people” in the new American republic.

The History of Mary Prince is a geographically layered narrative: The text transcribes Prince’s experiences of enslavement in the Caribbean from her birth in 1788 in Brackish Pond, Bermuda, to her harrowing labor on the salt industries on Grand Turk to her efforts to purchase her freedom in Antigua in the 1820s to her journey to London in 1828, where she continued her campaign for emancipation. Yet this chapter turns to The History to meditate on the methods we use for recovering Black geographies that may remain oblique in colonial archives. It argues that contemporary Black poets offer insights into Prince’s movements that may only exist as palimpsests within The History by speculating on her knowledge of Caribbean resistance movements, such as the Haitian Revolution and the Sunday Market Revolt in Antigua. By assembling this diachronic reading method, the chapter resists the impulse to achieve conclusive answers about Prince’s geographical relations but instead unfolds alternative possibilities for locating her in Black spaces.

This chapter argues that an adequate assessment of revolutions (and the role of law in revolutions) is often stymied by historical exclusions and theoretical myopia. Historical exclusions centralise certain experiences and present sanitized and one-sided narratives of the revolutionary experiences they centralise, especially with respect to violence, slavery, and colonialism. On the basis of such ideological uses of history, theoretical accounts paper over these social and political realities in order to legitimate particular revolutionary constitutions and to elevate them to the status of a paradigm or ideal type. This paradigm serves as the yardstick by which other experiences are assessed. The main feature of this paradigm is that it postulates a distinction between political and social revolutions. It presents the American Revolution of 1776 as an exemplar for the political revolution that concerns itself with the establishment of government under law. In contrast, the French Revolution of 1789 is presented as an exemplar for the social revolution that also seeks to tackle social injustice. The deficiency of this paradigm construction is not merely methodological, but also substantive and normative. It reduces the plurality of the revolutionary phenomena, it ignores the revolution’s dialectical nature, and it presents a certain type of revolutionary constitutions as ones that legitimate the polity.

Catherine Peters discusses how writers such as the Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano reworked the Romantic trope of the revolutionary “common wind” to forge kinship networks among forcibly displaced peoples. In formulating this argument, Peters shifts the conventional focus on the French Revolution as the hub of radical Romantic thought to the Haitian Revolution, where “fraternité” refers not to an abstract ideal but a very real desire to reconstitute those family relations disrupted by the institution of slavery.

In the three decades from the uprising of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue in 1791 to the recognition of Haitian independence by France in 1825, even amid the bitterest struggles, theatrical productions never fully stopped. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence, many of the officers surrounding him were directly involved in the theatre, as playwrights, actors, or both. Looking at figures such as Juste Chanlatte, Guy-Joseph Bonnet, Pierre-Charles Lys, Antoine Dupré and Jules Solime Milscent, this chapter makes a case for the importance of the theatre in the early years of Haitian independence as a reflection of the country’s evolving society, but also as a mirror and vector of domestic and international politics. A source of public entertainment and information designed and utilized for the most part by the country’s elites, the theatre was a prime tool in shaping and projecting idealized representations of the new nation and its leaders, within the country and to the outside world.

This chapter reads twentieth-century Haitian fictions of the Haitian Revolution to address how the political uses of Haiti’s independence war have made it a difficult literary subject for Haitian writers. The political custom of using Haitian revolutionists to express partisan political aims is prevalent in Haiti, so much so that it is the socio-political context animating Haitian narratives of the Revolution. I read Marie Chauvet’s novel, Dance on the Volcano (1957); René Depestre’s Vodou epic, A Rainbow for the Christian West (1967); Évelyne Trouillot’s novel, The Infamous Rosalie (2003); and Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel, Quiet Dawn (1990), fictional autobiography, I, Toussaint Louverture, with the Complicit Pen of the Author (2004), and novel, One Hour for Eternity (2008), and consider how each of these works addresses the exploitative uses of the Revolution in the prevailing political discourses of their time. I examine the painful intimacies of socio-political disunity presented in their writings, showing how creative treatment of the Revolution requires, at worst, questioning the Revolution’s success and, at best, resigning oneself to its unfinished nature.

This chapter seeks to revisit Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a foundational fiction of the Haitian Revolution which is considered to be the first novelistic representation of the event written by a Haitian author. This nineteenth-century novel gives rise to an infinite number of themes yet to be explored. The narrative design that examines the Slave Revolution of 1791 highlights the conflict between Blacks and mulattoes through two main protagonists, the brothers Romulus and Rémus. It focuses on the filiation that the Black Revolution maintains with the French Revolution by evacuating the question of agency among the revolutionaries and instead favors a purely providential approach through the white heroine Stella. The chapter attempts to offer a contrapuntal reading of Bergeaud’s figurative rendition of the Revolution by contrasting two dominant views, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.

This chapter examines the effort against the establishment of the West India Regiments in the 1790s. The spectre of insurrection in Saint-Domingue was a constant presence and critics of the regiments frequently likened them to Haitian soldiers, formerly enslaved insurgents, Maroons and other ‘brigands’ that opposed the British across the Caribbean in this period. Yet, White West Indians were not opposed to the arming of African men per se but favoured the use of irregular ‘black shot’, a form of military service that remained constrained by the bonds of slavery. In this way, the chapter not only explores the deeply held prejudices and phobias that made the West India Regiments so feared but also the contradictions in White West Indian and broader pro-slavery thought revealed by attitudes to military service.

States’ attempts to translate the messy realities of revolutionary-era coerced mobilities into orderly categories of law were met with efforts to define legal statuses by those forcibly removed. Focusing on revolutionary-era political refugees, the chapter shows how governments’ responses led to a proliferation of so-called alien laws across the Americas and Europe and how, despite their seemingly universal and neutral character, these laws reflected the ambiguous status and multiple mobilities during this period. As can be seen in a major legal battle involving a family of refugees of Haitian origin in Jamaica, the regulation of alien status had long-standing ramifications during a period in which the terms of political membership and state belonging were in full transformation across the Atlantic world. Both in mundane administrative interactions and legal battles, refugees engaged with the law and sought to shape and negotiate their status. In doing so, they could also rely on “vernacular” uses in other relevant branches of the law, such as legal distinctions governing freedom and slavery. As with freedom, belonging was not just granted or asserted by state authorities but could also be claimed and recrafted by those who sought it.

The Atlantic was, for centuries, crisscrossed by continuous fluxes of people moving either by choice or under pressure. These mobilities forged a complex web of relationships not only between the two shores of the Atlantic but also within the American space. Using a voluminous correspondence between two Saint-Domingue refugees, Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans from 1809 until his death in 1842, and Henri de Sainte-Gême, who lived in New Orleans between 1809 and his relocation to France in 1818, this chapter examines the role played by the Saint-Domingue refugees in repositioning the city within the Atlantic and Greater Caribbean. It contends that by studying a group of people who migrated under pressure (the refugees from the Haitian Revolution), we can develop conceptual frameworks (in this case, the Greater Caribbean) and spur fertile historical reinterpretations (of, in the present case, New Orleans’s position in the Americas).

This chapter underscores the central arguments of this volume by emphasizing the need for a simultaneous analysis of multiple flows of forced migrations. Focusing on the 1790s, it first looks at the transportation of convicts, vagrants, and deserters from Peninsular Spain and the Northern African presidios to the garrisons and the military outposts of Spanish America. Then it examines the flows of war captives, refugees, and convicts that originated from the Haitian Revolution and spread out across the Spanish Caribbean. The concluding section reflects on continuities and discontinuities in the regimes of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire in the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century. From this perspective, the chapter suggests the need for an integrated study of all punitive relocations and for the investigation of those processes whereby the “political” nature of punishment and the punished was construed or marginalized.

Chapter 5 studies the “problem of evil.” Violence is a learned behavior; peaceful interventions and de-escalation disrupt the learning cycles of violence. By 1859, Black and White abolitionists had been attempting to bring about peaceful interventions to stop slavery since the nation’s founding. But southern slaveholders were not going to give up their slave property. In the Civil War enslavers refused President Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation (being paid market price per slave in exchange for setting slaves free) time and again. This is the problem of evil. How does one disrupt a violent institution when, in this case, slaveholders refused peaceful means of abolishing it? John Brown understood this dynamic and he challenged the greatest enabler of slavery in the United States, the federal government. This chapter explores understandings of Black violence and Black authority (threats to the hostile differences of liberal society), the legal mechanisms used to deploy troops against slave uprisings, and interprets Brown’s interracial Virginia attack as an attempt to fashion a government that backs the enslaved over the slaveholder.

Histories of colonial energy tend to emphasize the development of the steam engine, the rise of electric power, or the beginnings of industrial agriculture, through the rise of cash crops such as indigo, cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Chapter 1, “Powering the Soul: Queer Energies in Haitian Vodou,” argues that any history of colonial energy production must also recognize that nonhuman forms of power were dependent on the human energy of enslaved labor, particularly reproductive labor. Yet far from considering enslaved labor as the flexible, malleable unit of energy desired by capitalist production, this chapter instead argues that Vodou radically disrupted the logics of racial capital and coerced biological reproduction. Vodou personhood is antithetical to the calculus of racial capitalism, and its porosity, I argue, helped reconfigure the plantation’s structures of power to resist imperialist extraction. Through an archive that ranges from colonial treatises to Vodou practices and epistemologies, this chapter highlights the ways in which Haitians expanded the category of gender and reimagined the energies of labor and birthwork under conditions of biocapitalist violence.

This conclusion returns to Saint-Domingue, which by the 1790s was rife with Jacobin sentiment, rebellions of enslaved Black laborers and free people of color, and intra-military disaccord. Provided are several short case studies of soldier violence and political action, which offer several limitations and conclusions to the eighteenth-century military–theatrical complex. Unlike the expansive national–military theatrical phenomenon in metropolitan France, the continued commitment to inequality and segregation in Saint-Domingue led to the disintegration of its white-centric theatrical institutions and practices – an important step in what would become the Haitian Revolution.

Saint-Domingue was at the center of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, because people enslaved in this French Caribbean colony launched the Haitian Revolution, which ended slavery, defeated French colonialism, and created Haiti, the second independent nation-state in the Americas. Beyond this extraordinary achievement, the factors that helped bring about the Haitian Revolution were also important in other aspects of the Atlantic revolutionary age. Saint-Domingue had the largest enslaved population in the Caribbean and developed a white superiority ideology that was unique in the region. It had an unusually large free population of color, with leaders who tried to claim their civil rights. The colony’s planters had a unique preoccupation with slave poisoning, which they traced to an escaped slave named Macandal. The colony experienced unique environmental stresses, including an anthrax outbreak that killed thousands of people. Saint-Domingue’s sugar and molasses tempted North Americans to break British colonial trade laws, which helped produce the American Revolution. The colony also led the Caribbean in the capitalistic production of sugar and coffee, which were at the heart of Europe’s consumer revolution. Saint-Domingue’s indigo dye and cotton helped launch industrial textile manufacturing.