Haitian Revolution Quotes

The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.

By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.

That was the beginning of the revolution. Many years have gone by and blood keeps running, soaking the soil of Haiti, but I am not there to weep.

Even today, most US history textbooks tell the story of the Louisiana Purchase without admitting that slave revolution in Saint-Domingue made it possible. And here is another irony. Haitians had opened 1804 by announcing their grand experiment of a society whose basis for citizenship was literally the renunciation of white privilege, but their revolution’s success had at the same time delivered the Mississippi Valley to a new empire of slavery. The

You know what I mean,’ she huffed. ‘She’s not Haitian. She’s French. And I just don’t see why she has to be so difficult.

Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America’s War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe’s Seven Years’ War — from 1756 to 1763 — and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain.

Dominicans are, in fact, Haitians by default Since the natives named the whole Island Ayiti Ignoring this fact makes you a dolt We are all Creole, just different mentality

Nia learned that our self-identity and connection to our roots is so powerful it can impact not only the course of our lives but also that of generations to come.

Academics keep writing about the glorious slave revolt of Haiti (1791-1804). As if it still is the best thing that could have happened to Haiti. But it is the worst thing that happened to Haiti. Ever since the slave revolt against the French, Haiti has been in chaos. Massive human suffering, lasting destruction. Why celebrate that? But no: Let’s hold another conference on that fantastic Haitian Revolution.

It's a marriage of convenience. Temporarily, so long as our interests coincide, however long it takes to dispose of that mob of petit blancs at Port-au-Prince. Afterward,' he waved his sticky fingers airily, 'everything will return to the way it was before.

Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence. The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.

[in response to Jean-François, who claimed that, "there is no irrevocable liberty for the former slaves except that which the Spanish monarch would grant them because, as a legitimate king, he alone has the right to legitimate that freedom"] . . . [W]e are free by natural right. It could only be kings . . . who dare claim the right to reduce into servitude men made like them and whom nature has made free.

drawn from the African idiom, their profession, or color." (The family of Julien Raimond complied grudgingly by switching from the "Raymond" of their French father to "Raimond.") A 1779 regulation made it illegal for free people of color to "affect the dress, hairstyles, style, or bearing of whites," and some local ordinances forbade them to ride in carriages or to own certain home furnishings. By the time of the Revolution free-coloreds were subjected to a variety of laws that discriminated against them solely on the basis of race.4

Early in the colonys history, he argued, the European men who came to the colonies "burning with the desire to make a fortune" but "weakened by the heat of the climate, often sick, and deprived of the aid wives of their own color could have given them," turned to "African women." These slave women cared for them assiduously, hoping to gain "the greatest recompense, their liberty." "These first whites," Raimond explained, "lived with these women as if they were married" and had children with them. Some freed the women and married them, as the Code Noir stipulated whites who had children with slaves should do. Many whites left land and slaves to their partners and children. Indeed it was generally expected that they would do so, and Saint-Domingue whites resisted royal attempts to institute laws outlawing such bequests. As a result, a class of property-owning free people of color emerged in the colony.s

The development of the sugar industry was to have a significant impact on the politics and culture of the island, since it lead to a huge increase in Cuba's slave population. This in turn helped to fuel the growth of the island's white racism, fueled by the migrants from Santo Domingo and Louisiana. The image of the Haitian revolution, and the inflated memory of its excesses — echoed not just in Cuba, but in the United States and Latin America as well — was to hover over Cuba throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, a permanent intimation of what might happen to the white population if faulty political or administrative decisions were made. Many whites in Cuba felt that they lived permanently in the shadow of a slave rebellion on the Haitian model.

Incidentally, there's a little historical footnote here, if you're interested. The oil company that was authorized by the Treasury Department under Bush and Clinton to ship oil to the Haitian coup leaders happened to be Texaco. And people of about my age who were attuned to these sorts of things might remember back to the 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration was trying to undermine the Spanish Republic at the time of the Spanish Revolution in 1936 and '37―you'll remember that Texaco also played a role. See, the Western powers were strongly opposed to the Spanish Republican forces at that point during the Spanish Civil War―because the Republican side was aligned with a popular revolution, the anarcho-syndicalist revolution that was breaking out in Spain, and there was a danger that that revolution might take root and spread to other countries. After the anarcho-syndicalist organizations were put down by force, the Western powers didn't care so much anymore [anarcho-syndicalism is a sort of non-Leninist or libertarian socialism]. But while the revolution was still going on in Spain and the Republican forces were at war with General Franco and his Fascist army―who were being actively supported by Hitler and Mussolini, remember―the Western countries and Stalinist Russia all wanted to see the Republican forces just gotten rid of. And one of the ways in which the Roosevelt administration helped to see that they were gotten rid of was through what was called the "Neutrality Act"―you know, we're going to be neutral, we're not going to send any support to either the Republican side or the Fascist side, we're just going to let them fight their own war. Except the "Neutrality Act" was only 50 percent applied in this case. You see, the Fascists were getting all the guns they needed from Germany, but they didn't have enough oil. So therefore the Texaco Oil Company―which happened to be run by an outright Nazi at the time [Captain Thorkild Rieber], something that wasn't so unusual in those days, actually―simply terminated its existing oil contracts with the Spanish Republic and redirected its tankers in mid-ocean to start sending the Fascists the oil they needed, in July 1936. It was all totally illegal, of course, but the Roosevelt administration never pushed the issue. And again, the entire American press at the time was never able to discover it―except the small left-wing press: somehow they were able to find out about it. So if you read the small left-wing press in the United States back in 1937, they were reporting this all the time, but the big American newspapers just have never had the resources to find out about things like this, so they never said a word. I mean, years later people writing diplomatic history sort of mention these facts in the margins―but at the time there was nothing in the mainstream.

the Haitian Revolution was the inspiration for the pursuit of liberty in the Americas.

Despite these rules, however, atrocities were committed against slaves by their masters and their masters’ agents regularly. Rape and torture were common occurrences. Even when the worst kinds of human brutality were not unleashed, just the nature of work and discipline put thousands upon thousands of souls into an early grave. It was no wonder that so many chose to risk running away.

Thus, by 1758, the situation in Saint Domingue was tense and volatile. That year, new laws were passed by the colonial government that aimed to consolidate power at the top for whites and control the populations below, both free and slave. This new system was more heavily based on race than on class, unlike what had reigned previously.

As discussed above, because of the insanely high rate of mortality, many of them were African-born. Africa was a very diverse place, however, and this diversity meant that many of these slaves could not even communicate with each other. Therefore, over the years and the generations, Creole languages and cultures emerged. These languages and practices blended those of many diverse peoples of Africa. They provided a base on which these people could unite, and much of it survives today in modern Caribbean culture. It allowed African slaves to create some semblance of home and community in the worst circumstances imaginable (at least for those who survived).

No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since.”—Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Fanon remained faithful to the ideals of the French Revolution, hoping that they might be achieved elsewhere, in the independent nations of what was then known as the Third World. He was a “Black Jacobin,” as the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James described Toussaint Louverture in his classic history of the Haitian Revolution.

by 1739 Saint-Domingue was the world’s richest and most profitable slave colony.

forms of resistance already endemic to the region continued to thrive and spread. The practice of Africans fleeing their enslavers, for example, was already a tradition of long standing at the turn of the eighteenth century.

devised clandestine ways to transmit information quickly and effectively.

powerful religious mystic

As Sutherland writes: “In the 18th century, Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then known, became France’s wealthiest overseas colony, largely because of its production of sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton generated by an enslaved labor force” (Sutherland, 2007). There were three general groups of African descent: those who were free (est. 30,000 in 1789), half mixed-race and identified as mulatto, who were quite wealthy; those who were enslaved (close to 500,000 people); and those who had run away (called Maroons) who had retreated deep into the mountains and lived off subsistence farming. Despite the harshness and cruelty of Saint-Domingue slavery, there were rebellions before 1791. As Carroll writes: “One plot even involved the poisoning of masters” (Carroll, n.d.; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). Sutherland notes that “the Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful … rebellion [and revolution] in the Western Hemisphere.

the planters and the commercial bourgeoisie undertook the similar task of supporting the Revolution while at the same time working to keep the social forces which it unleashed from spilling over into the colonies.

sailors took the lead by mounting violent protests against the exploitative working conditions of the slave trade.

During the course of the eighteenth century, Britain overtook all other European nations as the single largest exporter of Africans from Africa. By the end of the century, more than half the captives transported from west Africa were carried across the Atlantic in British ships. It was only after a vigorous campaign by anti-slave trade campaigners that Britain finally banned British ships from engaging in the trade. In fact, there had been a wide international movement against the trade and slavery itself since at least the 1780s. Northern US states had been banning the institution of slavery from that time. In France, the revolutionary government imposed a partial ban – the emancipation of second-generation slaves in the colonies – in 1791, which sparked the Haitian Revolution, although Napoleon reversed the ban in 1802.

Before the Haitian Revolution, Africans toiling in the sugar fields of Saint-Domingue spread the story of the zombi. This was a living-dead person who had been captured by white wizards. Intellect and personality fled home, but the ghost-spirit and body remained in the land of the dead, working at the will of the sorcerers-planters. Any slave could be a zombi..." - The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

televangelist Pat Robertson took to the world’s airwaves and tried to suggest that the earthquake was God’s vengeance for the Haitian Revolution, alleging that the slaves had sold their souls to Satan at Bwa Kayiman in return for the power to overthrow their masters.

And then another conquest began-that of the British.

The National Convention declares that slavery is abolished throughout the territory of the Republic; in consequence, all men, without distinction of color, will enjoy the rights of French citizens."37

In his bid to secure the loyalty of such ex-slaves, Sonthonax announced in late February that the National Convention had abolished slavery in all the French colonies.

When the British attacked Havana in 1762, Admiral de Hevia failed to scuttle the ships under his command. Thus, his ships fell into the hands of the British. The Admiral was returned to Spain where he was court-martialed, stripped of his titles and sentenced to house arrest for 10 years. Fortunately, he was pardoned three years later, on September 17, 1765. Reinstated he returned to active duty as the commander of the Marine Corps in Cadiz. He died seven years later on December 2, 1772, at Isla de León, Spain. Havana being under the rule of the British governor Sir George Keppel, the 3rd Earl of Albemarle, the British opened trade with their North American and Caribbean colonies, causing a dramatic transformation in the culture of Cuba, as well as bringing an increase to the population. Thousands of additional slaves were brought to the island under British rule, ostensibly to work on the new sugar plantations. The British occupation, however, didn’t last long, since the Seven Years’ War ended less than a year after the British arrived, and with the signing of the Peace of Paris Treaty the English agreed to surrender Cuba in exchange for Florida. In Britain, many people believed they could have done better, had they included Mexico and some of the colonies in South America, as part of the deal. The Florida Keys, not being directly connected to the Florida mainland, also remained in dispute, but it was not contested as long as free trade was permitted. After the deal was made with the British, Spain retained control of Cuba until after the secessionist movements were ended with the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898. The United States Senate ratified the treaty on February 6, 1899. In 1793, many more slaves were imported into Cuba when French slave owners fled from Haiti during the Slave Rebellion, also known as the Haitian Revolution. This brought 30,000 white refugees and their slaves into Cuba. With their knowledge of coffee and sugar processing, they founded many new plantations. This period of the English occupation and French influx, although chronologically short, was when the floodgates of slavery were opened wide. It was at this time that the largest numbers of black slaves ever, were imported into the country.

since Haiti became emancipated, there are already in the Antilles more free negroes and mulattoes than slaves.”44

European sailors and African slaves.

To the north, the victorious rebels did not extend their revolutionary principles to include the unfree, and by 1787 it was clear that the new nation would be built in large measure on the backs of the enslaved black workers who constituted fully a fifth of the population of the United States.

After the war, local groups—Quakers and non-Quakers alike—kept alive the opposition to the slave trade.

Smaller contingents of black loyalists ended up in the Bahamas and other British islands.

To Toussaint’s dismay, British cruisers patrolling the waters off Saint-Domingue strictly enforced these limits on maritime activity.

Such concerns were not misplaced. Throughout the eighteenth century, planters found the links between city and country both vexing and essential.

even a “successful” free black immigrant like George Liele could prove a troublesome presence in Jamaica. Liele, a Baptist minister, was responsible for introducing the Baptist faith to Jamaica and enlisted hundreds of black converts.

On Hispaniola, tensions between French and Spanish officials eased considerably in 1764 after the Spanish governor allowed a detachment of the maréchaussée (mounted militia) from Saint-Domingue to cross the border in pursuit of a band of runaways which had inhabited the mountainous stretches separating the colonies since 1728.

This new US offensive was a further stage in the decline of European influence in the southern Americas, a process which started with the Haitian revolution.

Neither the French Constitution of 1791 nor the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 abolished slavery, while the 1799 Constitution actually paved the way for the reintroduction of slavery in the French colonies in 1802,” Kaisary pointed out. “In fact, … the only French Revolutionary Constitution that contained a provision abolishing slavery was the otherwise conservative post-Thermidorian constitution of 1795.”38 Thus it was that the 1801 constitution made the Saint-

Though rarely counted as carefully in population censuses, free blacks and browns seemed to cause much greater day-to-day concern among government officials and white residents in both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue than in the Spanish colonies.

The apparent unrest among Irish soldiers and seamen in royal service in the early 1790s coincides closely with the emergence of nationalist republicanism in Ireland, a new and vital stage in the developing opposition to British rule.

served as a catalyst for later, more radical, and more successful insurrections

I believe our greatness lives within our differences and the world wants to divide us. But we were meant to come together in every arena as one, bringing with us our different perspectives, diversity, cultures, and ideas.

On the German Coast of Louisiana, where the rebellion took place—named as such for the German immigrants who settled there—roughly 60 percent of the total population was enslaved. The fear of armed insurrection had long been in the air. That fear had escalated over the course of the Haitian Revolution, in which the enslaved population in Haiti rose up against the French and in 1804 founded what became the first Black-led republic in the world. The French army was so beleaguered from battle and disease—by the end of the war, more than 80 percent of the soldiers sent to the island had died—that Napoleon Bonaparte, looking to cut his losses and refocus his attention on his military battles in Europe, sold the entire territory of Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson’s negotiators for a paltry fifteen million dollars—about four cents an acre. Without the Haitian Revolution, it is unlikely that Napoleon would have sold a landmass that doubled the size of the then United States, especially as Jefferson had intended to approach the French simply looking to purchase New Orleans in order to have access to the heart of the Mississippi River. For enslaved people throughout the rest of the “New World,” the victory in Haiti—the story of which had spread through plantations across the South, at the edges of cotton fields and in the quiet corners of loud kitchens—served as inspiration for what was possible.

I stepped off the creaking porch of the slave cabin and turned around, looking in the direction of the memorial to the 1811 slave revolt, which sits on the plantation’s edge. I thought of how I had grown up in Louisiana and had never been taught that the largest slave rebellion in US history happened just miles from the city that had raised me. I had never been taught that the Louisiana Purchase was a direct result of the Haitian Revolution, the uprising that laid the groundwork for all the slave revolts that followed in its wake.

It is not a liberty of circumstance, conceded to us alone, that we wish; it is the adoption absolute of the principle that no man, born red, black or white, can be the property of his fellow man.”—Toussaint Louverture

As discussed above, because of the insanely high rate of mortality, many of them were African-born. Africa was a very diverse place, however, and this diversity meant that many of these slaves could not even communicate with each other. Therefore, over the years and the generations, Creole languages and cultures emerged.

Most black people were poor in the Republican Period and had no civil mechanisms to defend their interests as the most discriminated sector. And it was even worse for those of Haitian and Jamaican extraction, who were deemed second-class blacks and discriminated against even by other blacks.

the tempest created by the black revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue and communicated by mobile people in other slave societies would prove a major turning point in the history of the Americas.

say), the French Revolution ironically and dialectically created the conditions for what we would now call its own deconstruction. This deconstruction was undertaken by those others who had apparently been subtracted from the “whole”: African American slaves.

conditions. Care for the “economic base” in this context entailed certain forms of “paternalism” and even “welfarism,” though always, again, within the limits of a structurally brutal system. No such forms of “care” were necessary in the Caribbean context. Or rather, in this context, the opposite attitude became necessary.

Here the distinction between tobacco and sugar, introduced by the great Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, can help us to analyze the situation, if somewhat allegorically.

areas of comparably high concentrations of slaves, including mining communities. In the United States, on the other hand, more than half of slaves lived on relatively small farms, and, of the other half, a full quarter lived on plantations that housed no more than fifty slaves.

blacks outnumbered whites by thirty to one.14 In Jamaica or in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the proportion of slaves in the overall population was only slightly less, between 80 percent and 85 percent, while in Cuba it was no less than 70 percent. In the United States, by contrast, slaves only made up a majority in South Carolina and Mississippi, and even here they made up proportionally much less of the population than in the places I have just mentioned, never more than 55 percent.

The Haitian Revolution was carried out by a slave population, the majority of whose members did not speak French, although this was obviously not the case for Toussaint Louverture, Henri Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, or other key leaders of the revolution. The majority of the population was relatively new to Saint-Domingue/Haiti. Similarly, the uprisings that took place in Bahía, Brazil, between 1807 and 1835, were fought by a population whose members were overwhelmingly African-born,

wars between competing colonial powers.

required a “free” labor force. I note, finally, and by way of comparison, that North American slaveholders – who, as we have seen, confronted some significant slave rebellions – never had to face a situation that was remotely similar, especially after 1776. This was because the status of the colonies was radically different; they did not have to respond to the demands of any metropolitan capital, and “class solidarity” in this context was infinitely more resilient. This made the dominant classes in the new United States much better equipped to suppress slave rebellions.

Now, with the exception of the Haitian Revolution, the most important slave rebellions, in addition to the rebellion in Bahía, took place in Guyana and Jamaica.

rebel soldiers. Whereas only 250 “new” slaves, most of them Igbo, participated in the rebellion of 1815, already in 1824, 1,200 slaves from plantations took part in an uprising. By Christmas of 1831, this number had risen to 20,000, and the rebellion included creoles. Ideologically, it prefigured the rise of a culturally complex “nationalism” in Jamaica, whose more recent manifestations include the Rastafari movement, based on Ethiopian traditions but with completely modern cultural components including reggae. Despite its defeat, then, the rebellion sealed the fate of slaveholders in Jamaica, and paved the way for eventual abolition.

about the Haitian

– merchant ships first from Portugal, then from the Netherlands, England, and France, had taken part in one of the most profitable enterprises in modernity: the slave trade, or the traite as it was called in French, in a strangely ambivalent expression (since traite carries the sense of “trafficking” but also the more euphemistic, “contractual” sense of “dealing” or “agreement”).

1791, there were roughly 39,000 whites in the colony; 27,000 people considered racially mixed; and approximately half a million black slaves.

the very lucrative “industry” that was the slave trade, which had practically built great cities, including Bordeaux and Nantes, just as in England it had practically built Bristol and Liverpool.

Of the half million black slaves on the island, only a minority were creoles (born in the colony). More than two-thirds had come directly from Africa. In part because of the absenteeism of the landowners, abuses and cruelty inflicted on these slaves were rampant and severe – much more so in Saint-Domingue than in the Southern United States, for instance, or in other slave societies in the Caribbean.

These slaves, born in Africa, belonged to ten or twelve different ethnic groups, and they spoke even more languages (since, in some of their native “tribes,” more than one language was spoken). In order to communicate with each other and with their masters, they used an “invented” language, a creole that was a sort of patois combining French words with African syntax, itself derived from combining or “averaging” several languages.

To be sure, Coptic Christianity, as practiced in contemporary Ethiopia and Eritrea, is a richly syncretic religion. Before being transformed once again in the Caribbean, the possession rituals that would come to be “Vodouized” thus included Christian elements, mixed together with many others.

to be “uninhabitable,” contributed to the formation of unity among people from different cultures and traditions. Under normal conditions, such people

within the context of the wider collective victory of the Haitian Revolution, so the tragedy of Toussaint Louverture paradoxically ends with an act representative of a certain vindication of Enlightenment values, one achieved by the slaves themselves. That it falls to Dessalines to lead this final struggle suggests that, as Paul B. Miller notes, "his resolve to declare Haiti independent qualifies him to a certain extent as more enlightened than Toussaint, more eager to throw off the yoke of arbitrary and tyrannical authority. Dessalines merely embodies the same paradox as Toussaint, though now inverted: emancipation achieved through barbarous autonomy rather than civilized tutelage."59

Victorious, black Haitians abolished slavery, declared racism illegal, and fought the first successful anti-imperial revolution in the history of the Atlantic. They also forever banned Frenchmen from the colony. “May the French tremble when they approach our coasts, if not by the memory of the cruelty that they have inflicted, at least by the terrible resolution that we are about to take to devote to death, anyone born French, who would dirty with his sacrilegious foot the territory of liberty,” Dessalines said.

up against French rule. It was a revolt like nothing anyone had ever seen. A revolt that the Africans in Haiti won. And because of that victory, Haiti would become the Eastern Hemisphere’s symbol of freedom. Not America. And what made that frightening to every American slaveholder, including Thomas Jefferson, was that they knew the Haitian Revolution would inspire their slaves to also fight back.

by the time this teacher was telling me that Wilberforce had set Africans free I already had some knowledge of the rebel slaves known as ‘Maroons’ across the Caribbean, and of the Haitian Revolution, so I had some idea that the enslaved had not just sat around waiting for Wilberforce, or anyone else for that matter, to come and save them. While it’s certainly true that Britain had a popular abolitionist movement to a far greater degree than the other major slaveholding powers in Europe at the time, and this is in its own way interesting and remarkable, generations of Brits have been brought up to believe what amount to little more than fairy tales with regard to the abolition of slavery. If you learn only three things during your education in Britain about transatlantic slavery they will be: 1. Wilberforce set Africans free 2. Britain was the first country to abolish slavery (and it did so primarily for moral reasons) 3. Africans sold their own people. The first two of these statements are total nonsense, the third is a serious oversimplification. What does it say about this society that, after two centuries of being one of the most successful human traffickers in history, the only historical figure to emerge from this entire episode as a household name is a parliamentary abolitionist? Even though the names of many of these human traffickers surround us on the streets and buildings bearing their names, stare back at us through the opulence of their country estates still standing as monuments to king sugar, and live on in the institutions and infrastructure built partly from their profits – insurance, modern banking, railways – none of their names have entered the national memory to anything like the degree that Wilberforce has. In fact, I sincerely doubt that most Brits could name a single soul involved with transatlantic slavery other than Wilberforce himself. The ability for collective, selective amnesia in the service of easing a nation’s cognitive dissonance is nowhere better exemplified than in the manner that much of Britain has chosen to remember transatlantic slavery in particular, and the British Empire more generally

The wars in Europe engulfed much of the world, precipitating and facilitating innumerable local conflicts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, including the Haitian Revolution,