Rituals, Runaways and the Haitian Revolution by Crystal Nicole Eddins

Eddins’ interdisciplinary study about the African slave rebellion on Saint Domingue (later to become Haiti) employs a wide variety of sources: more than 10,000 fugitive slave advertisements; historical sociological theories about social movements, colonialism, and revolution; archival materials from the Archivo General de las Indias, as well as historical and political-science literature about the African/Black diaspora. She uses this material to explore how the various relationships between African slaves of diverse ethnicities, creole slaves, fugitive runaways, and freed Blacks resulted in a collective consciousness that enabled the only successful national slave rebellion in the Americas. By examining these relationships and networks, Eddins seeks to correct the literature that makes “erroneous presumptions about the nature” of the differences between Ladinos, bozales, and cimarrones that supposedly discouraged their solidarity (3). She proves that “the web of networks between enslaved Africans, bozal and creole runaways, and a small number of free people of...