Making Haiti: Saint Domingue Revolution from Below Fick Carolyn E.

In 1789 the French colony of Saint Domingue was the wealthiest and most flourishing of the Caribbean slave colonies, its economy based on the forced labor of more than half a million black slaves raided from their African homelands. Fick argues that the repressed and uneducated slaves were the principal architects both of their own freedom and of the successful movement toward national independence. The revolt of this underclass in 1791--the only successful slave rebellion in history--gained the slaves their freedom and set in motion the colony's struggle for independence as the black republic of Haiti.In this pioneering study, Carolyn E.

Fick identifies "marronage," the act of being a fugitive slave, as a basic unit of slave resistance from which the revolution grew and shows how autonomous forms of popular slave participation were as important to the success of the rebellion