Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture has been the focus of many plays, novels, children’s books, illustrated histories, and biographies since the nineteenth century. Yet, Louverture’s story has seemed elusive to scholars until just recently. In this biography, Hazareesingh works “to return as far as possible to the primary sources, to try to see the world through [Louverture’s] eyes, and to recapture the boldness of his thinking and the individuality of his voice” (10). Through research in libraries and archives in France, Britain, and the United States, Hazareesingh shows how Louverture “embodied the many facets of Saint-Domingue’s revolution” (2). He challenges assumptions that European ideas brought about the Haitian Revolution, instead focusing on the local origins and “intellectual potency” of the Black revolutionaries (12).
Hazareesingh divides this sizeable tome into four parts, each with three chapters. The first part explores Louverture’s emergence as a revolutionary. He disputes the overstated differences between...