From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World

A comparative Marxist analysis of slave revolts across the Americas that draws a sharp distinction between rebellion — marronage, withdrawal, restoration of pre-enslavement conditions — and revolution, which seeks political transformation of society itself and the claiming of rights within the modern state. Genovese uses this framework to situate the Haitian Revolution as the exceptional case in which enslaved people crossed from one mode to the other, achieving a transformation that no other American slave society produced.