Rewriting Scottish Enlightenment History: Haiti and the Boundaries of Progress

When the leaders of the Haitian Revolution declared their independence from France on 1 January 1804, they did so with an uncompromising rejection of the racial and imperial order of the Atlantic world. Haiti was not the first successful colonial revolt – the American Revolution had already severed ties with Britain’s imperial authority three decades earlier – but to this day it remains the only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic world, and the only one to produce both the abolition of slavery and the foundation of an independent state.