Haiti, like other underdeveloped countries, has only a limited market value in our economics of attention. It figures little, if at all, in most of the general compendia that deal with Latin American history. Mass media take no account of it unless it becomes the scene of climatic catastrophes, popular unrest, violent regime change and foreign military interventions. For those who are familiar with the Haitian past, there is no doubt that this Caribbean republic deserves not only a broader but also a different public perception that takes into consideration the historical burden that it had to bear for more than two centuries. Its present situation is in many respects the late result of its colonial past and the extremely difficult conditions under which this Afro- American nation was founded by former slaves 200 years ago in the neighbourhood of hostile slave-holding countries. Research on the topic was for a long time the matter of a small group of specialists. During the first half of the 20th century, major contributions came from three groups of authors who wrote for quite different audiences. Haitian historians saw their main task in fostering the creation of a national conscience in their own country. Their French counterparts, most acquainted with the surviving archives, acted above all as chroniclers of a sunken colonial Empire. Outside Haiti, members of the Afro-American community discovered the mythographic power of the only successful slave revolution in world history that took place in that country, trying to employ it as a means to strengthen self-esteem in a time when an apartheid-like reality condemned people of African origin to a life at the bottom of Western society. Generally, the obstacles to a larger reception of Haitian history were hard to overcome. In the Old Continent, cultural hegemony lay in the hands of stubborn Eurocentrics who had the power to define what topics had to be regarded as legitimate/noteworthy or as illegitimate/marginal, dominating thus not only the existing economics of attention but also the distribution of institutional and financial resources that are vital for scientific research. Colonial history and their slavebased plantation economies could easily be disqualified as issues of minor public interest, despite the fact that the latter once constituted an integral part of the Western European economic systems. The acceleration of the globalisation process, a growing presence of the Afro- American community in our mass media as well as an expanding cosmopolitism improved the conditions for a broader reception of Caribbean colonial history and its long term consequences considerably. The Haitian Revolution is now, at least in the United States, an integral part of the historiography on slavery and the research on the Black Atlantic. In France, the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution celebrated in 1989 broke up the