Dilemmas of Emancipation: from the Saint Domingue Insurrections of 1791 to the Emerging Haitian State

Domingue, at that time the wealthiest colony of the Atlantic world, had set in motion a historical process that not only defied the legitimacy of their enslavement but, in so doing and without knowing it, also shook the onto-logical foundations of western discourse. In a recent article subtitled 'The Haitian Revolution as Unthinkable History', Haitian scholar, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, has made the claim that, since at least the Renaissance, philo-sophical assumptions about the nature of man, the state, the ordering of society, and the ranking of humanity, simply could not provide Europeans with a conceptual framework with which to apprehend the revolt of these slaves on such a massive scale and, even less so, to understand fully its revol-utionary potential.1 That a revolt of putatively submissive and uncivilized slaves, driven by the whip to labour in gangs and subsisting at the lowest societal level, should reach the point of laying bare the social and economic foundations of the colony, and eventually transform the structures of the colonial regime into the basis of an independent nation governed by these erstwhile slaves and their compatriots of colour (the former affranchis or free-coloureds) wa