The Haitian Revolution

23 Oct, 2014 970 History of North America

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Haitian Revolution. In 1791 an uprising began in the French colonial territory of St Domingue. Partly a consequence of the French Revolution and partly a backlash against the brutality of slave owners, it turned into a complex struggle involving not just the residents of the island but French, English and Spanish forces. By 1804 the former slaves had won, establishing the first independent state in Latin America and the first nation to be created as a result of a successful slave rebellion. But the revolution also created one of the world’s most impoverished societies, a legacy which Haiti has struggled to escape.

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Guests

  • Kate Hodgson No other episodes
    Postdoctoral Research Fellow in French at the University of Liverpool
  • Tim Lockley 4 episodes
    Reader in American Studies at the University of Warwick
  • Karen Salt 2 episodes
    Fellow in History in the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen

Reading list

  • Haiti, History and the Gods
    Joan Dayan (University of California Press, 1998) Google Books →
  • Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
    Laurent Dubois (Harvard University Press, 2004) Google Books →
  • The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below
    Carolyn E. Fick (University of Tennessee Press, 1990) Google Books →
  • Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue
    John D. Garrigus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Google Books →
  • Haitian Revolutionary Studies
    David P. Geggus (Indiana University Press, 2002) Google Books →
  • The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
    David P. Geggus (ed.) (University of South Carolina Press, 2001) Google Books →
  • The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution
    Malick Ghachem (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books →
  • The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
    C. L. R. James (Penguin, 2001) Google Books →
  • Toussaint Louverture: A Biography
    Madison Smartt Bell (Vintage, 2007) Google Books →
  • Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
    Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Beacon Press, 1997) Google Books →

Related episodes

Programme ID: b04lsqgs

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04lsqgs

Auto-category: 972.9405 (History of Haiti)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. In the late 18th century, the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean was among the richest countries in the world, supplying Europe and America's insatiable appetite for sugar.