The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848

A comparative Atlantic history of the overthrow of colonial slavery from 1776 to 1848, treating the Haitian Revolution as the hinge event in the wider Atlantic abolition movement rather than an isolated miracle. Blackburn's signature concept is 'revolutionary emancipationism' — the argument that general emancipation in the French Caribbean required a temporary convergence of Black insurgent struggle, Jacobin republican state power, and imperial war rather than either spontaneous colonial collapse or benevolent legislative gift. The book is especially strong for explaining why Saint-Domingue became the decisive Atlantic case, why the 1794 French abolition decree was both world-historical and fragile, and why Haiti became both a model and a terror to slaveholding societies afterward.