The Haitian Revolution was a
powerful blow against colonialism and slavery, and as its thinkers
and fighters blazed the path to universal freedom, they forced
anticolonial, antislavery, and antiracist ideals into modern
political grammar. The first state in the Americas to permanently
abolish slavery, outlaw color prejudice, and forbid colonialism,
Haitians established their nation in a hostile Atlantic World.
Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the rest of the Americas and
foreign nations and empires repeatedly attacked Haitian sovereignty.
Yet Haitian writers and politicians successfully defended their
independence while planting the ideological roots of egalitarian
statehood.
In
Awakening the Ashes,
Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and
political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how
their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in
the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and
equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of
Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more
immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle
that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an
idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended
French empire.