Laurent Dubois, Haiti, The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012) ("It's easy, in the abstract, to identify what makes for a successful democracy: a strong state, civil society, popular participation, an effective legal system. Many of these have in fact existed at one time or another in Haitian history. But the devastating combination of internal conflict and external intervention has stymied their consolidation into a network of sustainable and responsive political institutions. Remarkably, however, the history of repression has not snuffed out the Haitian struggle for dignity, equality, and autonomy. Haiti's people have steadfastly sustained the counter-plantation system that they created through their founding revolution and painstakingly anchored in the countryside over the course of the nineteenth century. Generation after generation, they have demonstrated their ability to resist, escape, and at times transform the oppressive regimes they have faced." Id. at 369.).
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Second Edition Revised (New York: Vintage, 1963, 1989) ("The massacre of the whites was a tragedy; not for the whites. For these old slave-owners, those who burnt a little powder in the arse of a Negro, who buried him alive for insects to eat, who were will treated by Toussaint, and who, as soon as they got the chance, began their old cruelties again; for these there is no need to waste one tear or one drop of ink. The tragedy was for the blacks and the Mulattoes. It was not policy but revenge, and revenge has no place in politics The whites were no longer to be feared, and such purposeless massacres degrades and brutalise a population, especially one which was just beginning as a nation and had had so bitter a past. The people did not want it--all they wanted was freedom, and independence seemed to promise that. Christophe and other generals strongly disapproved. Had the British and the Americans thrown their weight on the side of humanity, Dessalines might have been curbed, As it was Haiti suffered terribly from the resulting isolation. Whites were banished form Haiti for generations, and the unfortunate country, ruined economically, its population lacking in social culture, had its inevitable difficulties doubled by this massacre. That the new nation survived at all is forever to its credit for if the Haitians thought that imperialism was finished with then, they were mistaken." Id at 373-374. From the backcover: A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution In the Third World" "This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.").
