by Greg Livingston Childs, History, New York University
As recently as fifteen years ago, historical interest among US scholars regarding the importance of Haiti to the aptly named “Age of Revolutions” was still minimal. Aside from several important edited volumes and monographs, there was very little interest in discerning the impact of the Haitian Revolution on conspiracies, rebellions, and revolts by persons of African descent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In our current intellectual and political moment, however, new works on Haiti have appeared in rapid succession across a range of disciplines. The tide has changed greatly, and where it might have seemed out of place some years ago to link black politics in Anglophone, Hispanic, or Lusophone America with the revolutions of Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe, today it seems to be a given that part of our methodological approach should entail an inquiry regarding what enslaved and free blacks knew about rebellion in Saint Domingue and how they responded to it. Continue reading Comments on Herman Bennett’s “Slave Insurgents and the Political Impact of Free Blacks in a Revolutionary Age”
