In Our Time: S17/05 The Haitian Revolution (Oct 23 2014)
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.
with; Kate Hodgson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in French at the University of Liverpool; Tim Lockley, Reader in American Studies at the University of Warwick; and Karen Salt, Fellow in History in the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Producer: Luke Mulhall.
READING LIST:
Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (University of California Press, 1998)
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2004)
Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (University of Tennessee Press, 1990)
John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
David P. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Indiana University Press, 2002)
David P. Geggus (ed.), The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press, 2001)
Malick Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (first published 1938; Penguin, 2001)
Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (Vintage, 2007)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1997)
