Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution

The most useful single-volume narrative of the Haitian Revolution, combining narrative momentum with serious historiographical clarity by writing Saint-Domingue not as a colonial side story but as a central site in the making of the modern Atlantic world. Dubois insists the revolution cannot be reduced to a heroic leader story or a single explanatory key — it emerged from the interaction of plantation labor regimes, African continuities, free-colored politics, imperial war, and the renegotiation of what liberty would mean after slavery. Especially strong on the plantation as a site of insurgent knowledge, the August 1791 insurrection, the Bois Caïman ceremony, and Haiti's global afterlife.