This text contains a full edition, with commentary, of College of Arms manuscript of 'L'Armorial General du Royaume D'Hayti'.

Even before the 2010 earthquake, Haiti was known as a benighted place of poverty and corruption, and has often been blamed for its own wretchedness. But as historian Laurent Dubois makes clear, its difficulties are rooted in its founding revolution, the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world; the hostility that this rebellion generated among the colonial powers; and the intense struggle within Haiti itself to define its newfound freedom and realize its promise. Dubois vividly depicts the isolation and impoverishment that followed the 1804 uprising. He details how the indemnity imposed by the former French rulers initiated a devastating cycle of debt, while frequent interventions by the United States further undermined Haiti's independence. At the same time, Dubois shows, the internal debates about what Haiti should do with its hard-won liberty alienated the nation's leaders from the broader population, setting the stage for enduring political conflict. Yet the Haitian people have never given up on their struggle for true democracy.--From publisher description.

The first translation into English of 'Le Système colonial dévoilé', the first systematic critique of colonialism ever written from the perspective of a colonized subject.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was an event of international significance. Here is a literary history of those events, Haiti's war of independence is examined through the eyes of its actual and imagined participants, observers, survivors, and cultural descendants.

Focusing on the influential life and works of the Haitian political writer and statesman, Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), in this book Marlene L. Daut examines the legacy of Vastey’s extensive writings as a form of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a discourse devoted to attacking the enlightenment foundations of colonialism. Daut argues that Vastey, the most important secretary of Haiti’s King Henry Christophe, was a pioneer in a tradition of deconstructing colonial racism and colonial slavery that is much more closely associated with twentieth-century writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire. By expertly forging exciting new historical and theoretical connections among Vastey and these later twentieth-century writers, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black Atlantic authors, such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, Daut proves that any understanding of the genesis of Afro-diasporic thought must include Haiti’s Baron de Vastey.

Heraldry is often seen as a traditional prerogative of the nobility. But it was not just knights, princes, kings, and emperors who bore coats of arms to show off their status in the Middle Ages. The merchants and craftsmen who lived in cities, too, adopted coats of arms and used heraldic customs, including display and destruction, to underline their social importance and to communicate political messages. Medieval burgesses were part of a fascination with heraldry that spread throughout pre-modern society and looked at coats of arms as honoured signs of genealogy and history. Heraldry in Urban Society analyses the perceptions and functions of heraldry in medieval urban societies by drawing on both English- and German-language sources from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Despite variations that point to socio-political differences between cities (and their citizens) in the relatively centralized monarchy of medieval England and the more independent-minded urban governments found in the less closely connected Holy Roman Empire, urban heraldry emerges as a versatile and ubiquitous means of multimedia visual communication that spanned medieval Europe. Urban heraldic practices defy assumptions about clearly demarcated social practices that belonged to 'high'/'noble' as opposed to 'low'/'urban' culture. Townspeople's perceptions of coats of arms paralleled those of the nobility, as they readily interpreted and carefully curated them as visual expressions of identity. These perceptions allowed townspeople of all ranks, as well as noble outsiders, to use heraldry and its display - along with its defacement and destruction - in manuscripts, spaces (such as town houses, public monuments, halls, and churches), and performances (like processions and joyous entries) to address perennial problems of urban society in the Middle Ages. The coats of arms of burgesses, guilds, and cities were communicative means of individual and collective representation, social and political legitimization, conducting and resolving conflicts, and the pursuit of elevated status in the urban hierarchy. Likewise, heraldic communication negotiated the all-important relationship between the city and wider, extramural society - from the commercial interests of citizens to their collective ties to the ruler.