Marlene L. Daut

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...

Critics have been raking Ridley Scott’s new movie about Napoléon Bonaparte over the coals for its many historical inaccuracies.

As a scholar of French colonialism and slavery who studies historical fiction, or the fictionalization of real events, I was much less bothered by most of the liberties taken in “Napoleon” – although shooting cannons at the pyramids did seem like one indulgence too far.

I have argued elsewhere that historical fictions need not necessarily be judged by adherence to...

Twenty Six Letters: Some New Releases for April

By Jess Morency

March 28, 2025

Professor Daut is without a doubt one of the world's foremost academics on Haiti, and this monumental...

The revolutionary life of the king of Haiti: A slave's son beat the French empire and became 'the first monarch of the free world'.

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

8 March 2025

On June...

He was the first and only king of Haiti. What the life of Christophe says about its history

By Jacqueline Charles

Marlene Daut’s deep dive into Haiti’s first — and only — king...

How a utopian vision of Black freedom and self-government was undone in a world still in thrall to slavery and racism

After declaring independence from France on January 1, 1804, Haiti became the first state anywhere to permanently outlaw slavery and ban imperial rule. By establishing a land of freedom in a world of slavery, Haiti’s founders – the generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe and Alexandre Pétion – challenged the contradictions of the western European Enlightenment, whose...

The work of preparing the renamed capital city, Cap-Henry, for President Christophe to become King Henry happened within the astonishing space of just two months. On March 26, 1811, Christophe issued a proclamation announcing that his council of state had just promoted him from the position of president of the State of Haiti to king of the Kingdom of Haiti. Just one week later, another edict announced the creation of the nobility, with Christophe’s most cherished friends and administrators...

Resistance and Fugitivity on the Island of Saint-Domingue

On December 1, 1773, a 22-year-old enslaved man, about five-feet tall and originally from South Africa, was captured by French authorities in Petit-Goâve, on the island of Saint-Domingue, a French colony at the time. The captive had run away from the man who had enslaved him to become a maroon, or a fugitive from slavery. Upon his capture, when the jailer asked for his name, the man, who spoke no French, said likely the only word he...