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Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. LAURENT DUBOIS. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 357 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.95)
In Avengers of the New World, Laurent Dubois has crafted a nuanced yet highly readable narrative of the Haitian Revolution. Although largely a synthesis of the secondary literature written in the last twenty years, the book is strongly influenced by the classic work of Beaubrun Ardouin, Gabriel Debien, and C.L.R. James. Published in the bicentennial year of Haiti's independence from France, Avengers locates the Haitian Revolution as a seminal moment in the "Age of Revolutions" as well as in world history. The Haitian Revolution - the only successful slave revolt in the world - not only challenged the stability and logic of slave societies throughout the Americas, but also revealed and then expanded the limits of republican universalism. For, as Dubois notes, "if we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in Saint-Domingue who insisted that human rights were theirs too" (p. 3).
The chapters are arranged chronologically, the first three addressing prerevolutionary colonial tensions. Chapter 1 treats the colony's early history, including European settlement, the extermination of the indigenous Tainos, the rapid intensification of the slave plantation system, and the evolution of White Creole animosity toward distant metropolitan authorities. Chaper 2 focuses on Saint Domingue's enslaved population: their steadily increasing levels of importation; distinctions that Whites...