The Common Wind

Reflections of the late Professor Scott upon the vast and far-reaching reverberations of the Haitian Revolution, whose shockwaves extended beyond the narrow bounds of an island to shake the very foundations of the Atlantic world:

Prior to, during, and following the Haitian Revolution, regional networks of communication carried news of special interest to Afro-Americans all over the Caribbean and beyond. While General La Salle understood in 1792 the potential impact of the revolutionary currents in the Atlantic world on the minds and aspirations of Caribbean slaves, neither he nor his charges could have anticipated the extent to which the winds of revolution would blow in the other direction. Sweeping across linguistic, geographic, and imperial boundaries, the tempest created by the black revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue and communicated by mobile people in other slave societies would prove a major turning point in the history of the Americas.