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The University of North Carolina Press
466 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 illus., 4 maps, chronology, glossary, notes, index
Published: March 2004
Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804
Winner of the 2005 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Winner of the 2005 David Pinkney Prize, Society for French Historical Studies
Winner of the 2004 Prize in Atlantic History, American Historical Association
Winner of the 2004 John Edwin Fagg Prize, American Historical Association
The idea of universal rights is often understood as the product of Europe, but as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean. Dubois examines this Caribbean revolution by focusing on Guadeloupe, where, in the early 1790s, insurgents on the island fought for equality and freedom and formed alliances with besieged Republicans. In 1794, slavery was abolished throughout the French Empire, ushering in a new colonial order in which all people, regardless of race, were entitled to the same rights.
But French administrators on the island combined emancipation with new forms of coercion and racial exclusion, even as newly freed slaves struggled for a fuller freedom. In 1802, the experiment in emancipation was reversed and slavery was brutally reestablished, though rebels in Saint-Domingue avoided the same fate by defeating the French and creating an independent Haiti.
The political culture of republicanism, Dubois argues, was transformed through this transcultural and transatlantic struggle for liberty and citizenship. The slaves-turned-citizens of the French Caribbean expanded the political possibilities of the Enlightenment by giving new and radical content to the idea of universal rights.
"A Colony of Citizens, based on much original research, at last enables us to assess the true importance of battles in the Eastern Caribbean."
--The Nation
"Dubois convincingly argues that no history of the Age of Revolution or of human rights is adequate without including the actions of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean, who fought for emancipation and against racism. An important, thoughtful, and eloquent book. . . . Highly recommended."
--Choice
"A Colony of Citizens is the leading edge of a new wave of historical work on slavery and slave resistance in the Caribbean. Using the widest possible range of archives and manuscripts, Laurent Dubois offers a compelling account of slave emancipation in the era of the French Revolution
--and more tragically, of Napoleon's reimposition of slavery. This rich and nuanced work restores the colonial story of slavery and emancipation to its rightful place as one of the most significant moments in the history of revolution, democracy, and human rights."
"Imaginatively crafted and deeply probing in argument and interpretation, A Colony of Citizens focuses on the French colony of Guadeloupe to explore the role of enslaved Africans and their descendants in imagining and creating new worlds of universal freedom. In this very important book, Laurent Dubois demonstrates how the dynamic for change in societies and empires can be powerfully influenced by the agency of an underclass who make their own way upward and forward. The book throws much-needed light on the quite complex relations among slavery, revolution, race, ideology, and freedom during a critically significant era in world history."
--David Barry Gaspar, Duke University
"Adroitly linking the dramatic black revolutions of Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue, Laurent Dubois neatly balances the local and Atlantic dimensions and stakes a claim to the centrality of those revolutions to the history of empire and democracy."-David Geggus, University of Florida
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Cloth: $59.95
Paper: $24.95
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116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
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