Revolution in Haiti

In 1791, an event of world-historical significance began in present-day Haiti, the French colony of Saint-Domingue: the only successful slave revolt in history. This uprising crystallized the contradictions of the era that gave rise to the bourgeois West, resulting in the most radical revolution of the time. The principles of 1789 developed their own dynamic in the most profitable colony of their time. While French colonists clung violently to their rule based on slavery and racism, the slaves initiated a development that negated the entire model of European expansion west of the Atlantic. Haiti became the second independent state in the New World after the United States and the first country to constitutionally prohibit slavery and racial discrimination. Philipp Hanke describes the colonial world of Saint-Domingue, the ideological origins and course of the revolution, as well as the ongoing struggle of the Haitian people for independence, which remains unfinished to this day.