Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture, by Sudhir Hazareesingh

David Geggus

doi:10.1163/22134360-09503020

Abstract

Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture, by Sudhir Hazareesingh

Highlights

Sudhir Hazareesingh is a specialist in the political and intellectual history of modern France. This is his ninth book but his first that concerns the Caribbean. He joins a host of other writers whose biography of Toussaint Louverture represents their first publication on the Haitian Revolution
Hazareesingh has read extensively in the secondary literature, though apparently missing some of the more academic Louverture research, and he references a large body of primary sources
A better command of the primary sources might have prevented Hazareesingh’s perpetuation of flimsy popular stories such as Toussaint’s being the mysterious Médecin Général, his driving his employer’s wife to safety at the start of the slave uprising, or the British seeking to make him an independent monarch; so, too, perhaps some of his own patently erroneous assertions: that Africans were unusually concentrated in northern SaintDomingue, that Toussaint negotiated the terms of Spain’s intervention in the slave uprising, or that most of his early soldiers came from maroon bands

Summary

Introduction

Sudhir Hazareesingh is a specialist in the political and intellectual history of modern France. He joins a host of other writers whose biography of Toussaint Louverture represents their first publication on the Haitian Revolution. With nearly 1,700 endnotes, works such as Black Spartacus are routinely hailed as “meticulously researched” by reviewers who know nothing of their subjects’ source material.

Results

Conclusion