Before Haiti Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue [Paperback]

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This book details how France's most profitable plantation colony became Haiti, Latin America's first independent nation, through an uprising by slaves and the largest and wealthiest free population of people of African descent in the New World. Garrigus explains the origins of this free colored class, exposes the ways its members supported and challenged slavery, and examines how they shaped a new 'American' identity.The Development of Creole Society on the Colonial Frontier Race and Class in Creole Society: Saint-Domingue in the 1760s Freedom, Slavery, and the French Colonial State Reform and Revolt after the Seven Years War Citizenship and Racism in the New Republic Sphere The Rising Economic Power of Free People in Color in the 1780s Proving Free Colored Virtue Free People of Color in the Southern Peninsula and the Origins of the Haitain Revolution Revolution and Republicanism in Aquin Parish

'This work makes an enormous contribution to the existing scholarship on Haiti, on free people of colour in the Caribbean, and more generally to our understanding of the history of the Atlantic world.' - Laurent Dubois, Michigan State University, USA

'In 1791, the western third of the island of Hispaniola stood as the crown jewel of France's empire and the world's most valuable slave-based colony. It also possessed the most prosperous class of free-coloured slaveholders in the history of the Americas. John Garrigus zeroes in on members of this ambivalent class, particulary those from St. Domingue's South Province who exerted disproportionate influence in challenging the metropolis to apply the high ideals of the French Revolution to end racial discrimination in France's overseas possessions. With this important book, Garrigus has illuminated the complex process that transformed slave revolc%