Question: How did conflicts over questions of liberty, freedom, equality and brotherhood shape both the pirates’ resistance tohydrarchy, and inspire the Haitian and Guadeloupean revolutions? What is at stake in both of these struggles, not only for the 18th century but for subsequent Caribbean history?

Above question is related to the book of “Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus, eds., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean”

Book Summary : This module shifts toward resistance to the slave complex and developing Atlantic capitalism, looking at groups who struggled against this arrangement. We will also be looking at how the new ideas about freedom and liberty in Europe – what we call The Enlightenment – had on the Caribbean, as slaves embraced liberal ideals and as anti-slavery societies increasingly pressured governments to abolish chattel slavery. Our main reading is Laurent Dubois’s and John Garrigus’s edited collection on the slave revolution in the Caribbean. The collection opens with the editors providing a brief history of the Revolution, walking us through the major events and themes of the revolution, following the story of the Haitian Revolution from slave colony to political dispute to slave revolt to full-blown revolution to nationhood. Dubois and Garrigus, experts on the revolution, show the the tremendous stakes of the Revolution, both in its day and in our own. The second part of the book, which also feeds into your primary source assignment, is to read through the primary documents in the second half of the book. In these documents, you will get a clear picture of the structure of pre-revolutionary society, the impact of the French Revolution in the Caribbean, the eyewitness reports of those who lived through it, the experiences of the rebel slave and revolutionary leaders, and the impact of the events on European and Caribbean history.