Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture [Paperback]

Winner of the 2021 Wolfson History Prize

Black Spartacusis a tour de force: by far the most complete, authoritative and persuasive biography of Toussaint that we are likely to have for a long time . . . An extraordinarily gripping read. David A. Bell,The Guardian

A new interpretation of the life of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture

Among the defining figures of the Age of Revolution, Toussaint Louverture is the most enigmatic. Though the Haitian revolutionarys image has multiplied across the globeappearing on banknotes and in bronze, on T-shirts and in filmthe only definitive portrait executed in his lifetime has been lost. Well versed in the work of everyone from Machiavelli to Rousseau, he was nonetheless dismissed by Thomas Jefferson as a cannibal. A Caribbean acolyte of the European Enlightenment, Toussaint nurtured a class of black Catholic clergymen who became one of the pillars of his rule, while his supporters also believed he communicated withvodouspirits. And for a leader who once summed up his modus operandi with the phrase Say little but do as much as possible, he was a prolific and indefatigable correspondent, famous for exhausting the five secretaries he maintained, simultaneously, at the height of his power in the 1790s.

Employing groundbreaking archival research and a keen interpretive lens, Sudhir Hazareesingh restores Toussaint to his full complexity inBlack Spartacus. At a time when his subject has, variously, been reduced to little more than a one-dimensional icon of liberation or criticized for his personal failingshis white mistresses, his early ownership of slaves, his authoritarianism Hazareesingh proposes a new conception of Toussaints understanding of himself and his role in the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century.Black Spartacusis a work of both biography and intellectual history, rich with insights into Toussaints fulã"