On 1 January 1804, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue became the newly independent state of Haiti. Some twelve years of revolutionary struggle had led to this declaration of independence, the culminating moment of ‘the only successful slave revolt in history’, as the Caribbean scholar C. L. R. James admiringly characterized the events of 1791–1803 in his The Black Jacobins (vii), first published in 1938 and still ‘easily the most influential general study’ of the Haitian Revolution (Geggus, 2002, 31). For James, the revolutionary transformation of colonial Saint-Domingue into postcolonial Haiti, and of former slaves into ‘a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day’ (vii), stood as the very model for a successful struggle against imperial (and capitalist) rule across the globe in the twentieth century, and especially for those of his comrades in Africa who were only then starting out on the ‘long and difficult road’ leading to a place and a time when the ignorant dreams of ‘the imperialists envisag[ing] an eternity of African exploitation’ would be decisively interrupted, as they had been in 1804 by ‘the men, women and children who drove out the French’ (316, 314, 294).

With his insistence, in The Black Jacobins, ‘that the story he had to tell was deeply relevant for the world in which he lived’ (Dubois, 2004, 2), James showed a rare willingness to situate the Haitian Revolution at the front and centre of world history, to draw it out from the tenebrous margins and respectfully listen to an event of global significance that had long been, and would continue to be, ignored or trivialized ‘in written history outside of Haiti’, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in his influential analysis of ‘the general silence that Western historiography has produced around the Haitian Revolution’ (1995, 96, 97).