Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution
Marlene L. Daut
University of North Carolina Press
In Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known 18th- and 19th-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.