Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica

A comparative post-emancipation history arguing that in both Haiti and Jamaica, formerly enslaved people built real public worlds — petition, press, assembly, landholding, insurgent action — that pressed for genuine citizenship, while elites worked to narrow or destroy them. Sheller's central corrective is to read the nineteenth-century Haitian peasantry as politically active rather than withdrawn, making the Piquet Rebellion and the 1843–1844 crisis legible as struggles over democracy rather than mere color-war episodes.