Why would a revolution refuse its own name?

Enslaved people in Saint-Domingue turned the richest colony in the Atlantic world into an independent state and forced the French Revolution’s language of freedom to become genuinely universal. Victory did not bring easy entry into the international order: isolation, debt and historical silence became the revolution’s second struggle.

What you will follow

This guided story moves the same world map through 13 sourced scenes. It begins at the opening rather than dropping you into an unexplained year.

How to read the map: The map uses discrete, approximate border snapshots. A narrated year may use the closest available snapshot, and schematic arrows show relationships rather than precise routes.

Related subjects on the map

• Transatlantic slave trade
• The abolition of slavery

Sources used by this story

1. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004).
2. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938).
3. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
4. David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
5. Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
6. David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
7. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
8. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London: Verso, 1988).