Ever since C. L. R. James published The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London, 1938), a study of the Haitian Revolution that toppled the world’s richest slave-based sugar plantation economy in French Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804, historians have not been able to ignore the contribution of enslaved Africans in the Americas to their own emancipation in the succeeding century. A plethora of studies of African agency has shed new light on the Saint-Domingue revolt; on other revolts by enslaved and free Africans elsewhere in the Americas before, during, and after Haiti’s time; on maroon communities established by runaway slaves; on self-purchase and other manumission processes exploited by slaves; and on other methods that slaves adopted to assert some measure of control over their lives. These studies have provided insights both into the workings of slave-plantation societies and into the subaltern activities of the enslaved people...

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