Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue

A reconstruction of Saint-Domingue's free people of color — particularly in the southern peninsula — that shows how race, wealth, militia service, and public humiliation were historically produced rather than timeless. Garrigus argues that the conditions enabling the Haitian Revolution must be understood through the legal and social degradation of the affranchis in the decades before 1791, not only through the enslaved insurgency itself.