The generic prescription of universal justice as equality, premised upon the destruction of slavery, appeared fully formed as immanent critique from the first moments of the Haitian Revolution. In an extraordinary letter of June 1792, mere months after the initial uprising that had liberated the slaves of northern Saint-Domingue, three leaders of that movement (Jean François, Biassou, and Toussaint Louverture, signing as his fourteen-year-old nephew Belair) wrote to the colonial assembly. The three co-authors of this letter cast their demands to the assembly not in sectarian terms, nor on their own behalves, nor even on behalf of slaves or blacks in general, but rather as predicates of the universal class of human beings. From its very first iteration, Caribbean Critique appears concerned not with individuals or with classes but with a series of abstract, universal concepts of relevance to all human beings and not to any specifically regional, racial, or gendered experiences. Yet these universal concepts – right, freedom, equality, justice – are formulated by enslaved, Caribbean subjects in ways that would have been unavailable or unimaginable for the white French subjects of 1789: ‘These are men […] whom you call your slaves, and who claim the rights to which all men may aspire’ (Nesbitt 2008a: 5–6).

The logic expressed by the signatories of the June 1792 letter is inclusive, not divisive: by their words, the human race is one, and all who are its subjects are to be counted as one human being, equal to another. If this has not been the case for blacks and slaves heretofore, it is because the colonial world of total violence rendered blacks and slaves invisible, uncounted, and unthinkable as subjects of right. Instead, as the writers of this letter point out, they were counted only as living machines for the production of profit: ‘Under the blows of your barbarous whip, we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony.’