Saint-Domingue’s slaves were mostly African, making the revolution partly an African revolution

Evidence

The Haitian Revolution was a uniquely transcultural movement. The population of Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century was not just majority slave; it was also majority African. These slaves had come from many different regions and political, social, and religious contexts, and they shaped the revolution with what they brought with them. James recognized decades ago that the Haitian Revolution was a precursor to the struggles for African decolonization. Now we are increasingly coming to understand that it was itself in many ways an African revolution. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 30

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to other Atlantic-world revolutionary studies; Geggus’s work on the intractable question of how to imagine enslaved Africans’ beliefs without exoticizing or occidentalizing them.