For a long time, European and North American historians paid little attention to the extraordinary series of events that now goes by the name of the Haitian Revolution. In their view, revolutions in this period involved Western, middle-class revolutionaries overthrowing aristocratic elites and establishing democratic institutions while paving the way for industrial capitalism. Haiti clearly did not fit this model, and it did not help that stories of “savage” Haitian blacks slaughtering innocent white colonists remained distressingly influential many decades into the twentieth century. Over the past generation, however, the old model of revolution has lost its appeal, while historians have become better attuned both to currents of global history and to “subaltern” voices.
Source : The Contagious Revolution
