Saint-Domingue was the Americas’ first postemancipation society with no transition period

Evidence

Historians of “postemancipation” societies have explored how the end of slavery led to new conflicts, and new forms of oppression, in plantation societies such as Jamaica, Cuba, and the United States. Revolutionary Saint-Domingue was the first such society in the Americas, and what happened there became a touchstone in subsequent debates about how best to move from slavery to freedom. Abolition in Saint-Domingue took place abruptly, with no period of transition of the kind that was then under way in the northern United States, and which most abolitionists advocated. Faced with a dramatically new situation, administrators in Saint- Domingue had to invent a regime for containing and channeling the impact of emancipation. Within a few years, those who were overseeing the new regimes of labor that replaced slavery were black, and often exslaves. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 29

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader comparative study of emancipation societies like Jamaica and Cuba, and echoes debates over gradualist Northern US abolition.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the book’s emphasis on sacrifice and systems of coerced labor — the abrupt, untransitioned abolition here recasts emancipation as its own kind of social rupture rather than a gentle gift.