The Haitian Revolution comes of age: ten years of new research

In the past ten years, scholarship on the Haitian Revolution can truly be said to have come of age. Emphatically no longer “silenced,” as Michel-Rolph Trouillot complained in 1995, the events of 1791 to 1804 and beyond are now the subject of a rich and diversified historical literature reflecting a multiplicity of points of view. Since 2010, there have been four major new biographies of Toussaint Louverture, as well as new examinations of topics ranging from the nature of pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue society to the place of Haiti in the world after the declaration of independence. Customary assumptions about a total rupture between the colonial world and the revolutionary era and about Haiti's isolation after 1804 have been called into question, and the extent and originality of Haitian contributions to early nineteenth-century political debates have been documented. At the same time, the recent explosion of scholarship in the field has highlighted questions that call for further exploration.