The Colonial System Unveiled

Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution

(1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as

an event of world-historical importance. The former slaves’ victory over

their French masters and the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in

1804 is being newly heralded not only as a seminal moment in the

transnational formation of the ‘black Atlantic’ but as the most

far-reaching manifestation of ‘Radical Enlightenment’.

The best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after the revolution

is Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), who authored over ten books and pamphlets

between 1814 and his murder in 1820. His first and most incendiary work, Le

systeme colonial devoile (1814), provides a moving invocation of the

horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Its trailblazing

critique of colonialism anticipates by over a hundred years the

anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Cesaire, Fanon, and Sartre.

Translated here for the first time, Vastey’s forceful unveiling of the

colonial system will be compulsory reading for scholars across the

humanities.