Introduction: the Haitian Revolution and Cuban slave society; 1. 'A colony worth a kingdom': Cuba's sugar revolution in the shadow of Saint-Domingue; 2. 'An excess of communication': the capture of news in a slave society; 3. An unlikely alliance: Cuba and the black auxiliaries; 4. Revolution's disavowal: Cuba and a counterrevolution of slavery; 5. 'Masters of all': echoes of Haitian independence in Cuba; 6. Atlantic crucible: 1808 between Haiti and Spain; 7. A black kingdom of this world: making history, imagining revolution in Havana, 1812; Epilogue: Haiti, Cuba, and history: afterlives of antislavery and revolution.
Studies the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba, where the violent entrenchment of slavery occurred while slaves in Haiti successfully overthrew the institution.
Ada Ferrer is Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, which won the 2000 Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book written by a woman in any field of history.
'This remarkable book addresses a fundamental paradox in the
history of the Atlantic World: plantation slavery retrenched and
intensified even as antislavery politics scored its first great
triumph. The Haitian revolution offered the world a beacon of
freedom, but it also stimulated an economic, political, and
philosophical reaction, exemplified in the consolidation of slavery
on an unprecedented scale in neighboring Cuba. With precision and
passion, Ferrer shows how liberation and bondage made and unmade
one another. Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, this
is a masterwork of analytical storytelling.' Vincent Brown, Harvard
University, Massachusetts
'Ada Ferrer treats in tandem two radically different developments
that embodied the Caribbean's experience of the Age of Revolution.
Widely researched and drawing on new sources, this is a fascinating
reading of two turning points in the region's history.' David
Geggus, University of Florida
'Drawing on archival records from Cuba, Spain, and France, Ada
Ferrer has crafted a brilliant work that goes far beyond
comparative history. With elegant prose and telling detail, she
traces the ways in which Cubans and the Africans among them
reflected on the reality of slavery and the example of freedom when
they looked - and sailed - across the Windward Passage to the
revolutionary society of Saint-Domingue/Haiti. This splendid book
allows us to listen to and watch the soldiers, planters, runaways,
and sojourners who made that crossing, or heard from those who had,
and then tried to shape their own situation in the light of
transformative new knowledge.' Rebecca J. Scott, University of
Michigan
'Ferrer's contribution to Caribbean and age of revolution history
is original, well researched, and accessible. Summing up:
recommended.' R. Berleant-Schiller, Choice
'This fine book follows untraveled paths, combining fascinating
discoveries in new primary sources with refreshing interpretations
of a difficult subject … offers an ongoing comparison and
discussion of the interactions between two sugar islands, St
Domingue, France's richest colony during the eighteenth century,
and Cuba, long neglected as an economic colony by Spain.' Gwendolyn
Midlo Hall, The Journal of American History
'Ferrer's excellent book is a singular achievement, and it will
serve as a baseline for the next generation of scholarship on the
Atlantic's Age of Revolution and Emancipation.' Stuart B. Schwartz,
The American Historical Review
'… Ada Ferrer explores the tensions that underlay two overlapping
revolutions on neighboring Caribbean islands at the turn of the
nineteenth century: one, a struggle against slavery that culminated
in the foundation of the independent nation of Haiti, the other, a
'sugar revolution' that entrenched enslavement in Cuba … If the
Haitian Revolution was intertwined with the rise of Cuban slavery,
Ferrer compellingly shows, it also paved the way for ongoing
challenges to the new regime, from the vessels of slave liberation
outfitted by successive Haitian states to the voices of antislavery
conspirators and patriot insurgents over the course of Cuba's
nineteenth century.' Andrew Walker, H-Haiti
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