David Geggus
I am an emeritus professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, where I taught courses on Caribbean history, Colonial Latin America, and slavery in the Atlantic world. Educated in London and Oxford, I held research positions at the Universities of Southampton and Oxford before joining the University of Florida in 1983. My research, conducted in ten countries, has focused on Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution. I have published seven books, including Slavery, War, and Revolution (Oxford, 1982), Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, 2002), and The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001), as well as more than 120 academic articles. My most recent book, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Boston 2014), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. My research was financed by fellowships awarded by the French Government, The British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Humanities Center, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Social Science Research Council (of the UK and US), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Carter Brown Library.
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Africans in the Haitian Revolution. It argues that two highly influential articles published 30 years ago by John Thornton greatly exaggerated the presence of such “Congos” in the colony, and overstated that of Africans in general. Amplified in subsequent works by Thornton and others, this exaggeration has become the prevailing orthodoxy and the issue has gone entirely unnoticed down to today. To make its point, the article draws on a data set of
more than 31,000 enslaved workers of known origin and it attempts to calculate population change on the eve of the revolution. It lays out the way the ethnic composition of the black population varied by crop type and region, and produces for the first time estimates for the whole of Saint Domingue. It additionally makes two excursions into African studies. The first is to investigate the ethnic/geographic origins of the “Congos.” The second relates to the nature of slavery in West-Central Africa and certain items of Kikongo vocabulary. This forms part of a critique of an ambitious article by James Sweet concerning the influence of Kongolese in Saint-Domingue that constitutes the article’s final section.
Africans in the Haitian Revolution. It argues that two highly influential articles published 30 years ago by John Thornton greatly exaggerated the presence of such “Congos” in the colony, and overstated that of Africans in general. Amplified in subsequent works by Thornton and others, this exaggeration has become the prevailing orthodoxy and the issue has gone entirely unnoticed down to today. To make its point, the article draws on a data set of
more than 31,000 enslaved workers of known origin and it attempts to calculate population change on the eve of the revolution. It lays out the way the ethnic composition of the black population varied by crop type and region, and produces for the first time estimates for the whole of Saint Domingue. It additionally makes two excursions into African studies. The first is to investigate the ethnic/geographic origins of the “Congos.” The second relates to the nature of slavery in West-Central Africa and certain items of Kikongo vocabulary. This forms part of a critique of an ambitious article by James Sweet concerning the influence of Kongolese in Saint-Domingue that constitutes the article’s final section.
N. Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment
published in American Historical Review (Dec 2009): 1501-2