Marlene L. Daut

In 2002, Haiti’s former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide argued that France should pay his country US$21 billion.

The reason? In 1825, France extracted a huge indemnity from the young nation, in exchange for recognition of its independence.

April 17, 2025, marks the 200th anniversary of that indemnity agreement. On Jan. 1 of this year, the now-former president of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, Leslie Voltaire, reminded France of this call when he requested that France “repay the...

In this series commissioned by Marlene L. Daut, scholars reveal what 220 years of Haitian independence means for how we tell the story of abolition and the development of human rights around the world.

BY MARLENE L. DAUT

The first land to be colonized in the Americas was Haiti. Europeans first enslaved native Americans and captive Africans there, too. But the first permanent abolition of slavery also happened on Haiti, in 1804: 220 years ago this month. Such abolition only occurred in the rest...

An exiled revolutionary, André Rigaud’s return to the island of his birth changed Haiti’s political destiny. Was he sent back to help reinstate slavery? His enemies would have us believe so.

In 1893 the Black American playwright William Edgar Easton published Dessalines, a Dramatic Tale: A Single Chapter From Haiti’s History, a play about the Haitian Revolution. Ostensibly a biopic of independent Haiti’s founder General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the play prominently featured another of the...

The 2025 Cundill History Prize Shortlist

From activism for women’s rights to the lives of Soviet dissidents, from the struggle for liberation in Korea and Haiti to a sixteenth...

The Haitian journalist Roberson Alphonse published this great write-up of my August 14 book talk at the Haitian Embassy in Washington, D.C.: Marlene L. Daut’s Book Brings Henry...

The April 2025 update to my article on the Haitian indemnity published over at The Conversation, 200 years ago, France extorted Haiti in one of history’s greatest heists – and...

By Marlene L. Daut

This week marked a historic day of teaching for me. Along with my colleague Professor Kaiama Glover, we launched a two-semester course, "Haiti Writes I" and "Haiti Writes II." After a search through institutional course records at Yale, Kaiama confirmed that our class is the first at the university to be devoted solely and entirely to Haitian literature. For me, this is both a moment to be celebrated and one to be pondered.

Putting aside for now the deep historical,...

By Marlene L. Daut

In 1998, an international organization, whose mission is to promote peace and security across the world, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), named August 23rd as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. This date was chosen to honor the Haitian Revolution, which started on the night passing from August 22nd to August 23rd in 1791.

UNESCO’s official statement honors Haiti for changing the world’s...

By Marlene L. Daut

Back in 2021, I wrote an article called “Why did Bridgerton erase Haiti?”. In the article I asked a deceptively simple question:

“If people want to see Black aristocracy on screen, then why not just put them in nineteenth-century Haiti where they really lived?”

Simon Sebag Montefiore, who reviewed my book, The First and Last King of Haiti, for The Times of London evidently wondered the same thing when he wrote:

“I don’t know if the makers of Bridgerton, Netflix’s glossy late...