Colonial System Unveiled

Long the subject of a "monumental silence" in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed as an event of world-historical importance. In a range of disciplines across the humanities, the former slaves' decisive 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". Without a doubt, the most prominent post-revolutionary Haitian man of letters was Pompee Valentin Vastey, who served as publicist for Henri Christophe's regime throughout the 1810s, authoring four major books between 1814 and 1819, along with a series of pamphlets. His finest work Le Systeme colonial devoile (1814), translated here, not only offers a blistering account of French atrocities in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, but also stands as the first systematic critique of colonialism ever written from the perspective of a colonized subject. Both because of its testimonial worth as a moving invocation of the atrocities of slavery and because of its trail-blazing status as a book that anticipates by over a hundred years the insights of Fanon and Sartre into the "systematic" nature of colonialism, this translation will be compulsory reading for scholars across the humanities.