Winner of the 2021 Wolfson History Prize
**
"Black Spartacus is a tour de force: by far the most complete,
authoritative and persuasive biography of Toussaint that we are likely
to have for a long time . . . An extraordinarily gripping read." --David
A. Bell, The Guardian**
**
A new interpretation of the life of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint
Louverture**
Among the defining figures of the Age of Revolution, Toussaint
Louverture is the most enigmatic. Though the Haitian revolutionary's
image has multiplied across the globe--appearing on banknotes and in
bronze, on T-shirts and in film--the only definitive portrait executed
in his lifetime has been lost. Well versed in the work of everyone from
Machiavelli to Rousseau, he was nonetheless dismissed by Thomas
Jefferson as a "cannibal." A Caribbean acolyte of the European
Enlightenment, Toussaint nurtured a class of black Catholic clergymen
who became one of the pillars of his rule, while his supporters also
believed he communicated with vodou spirits. And for a leader who once
summed up his modus operandi with the phrase "Say little but do as much
as possible," he was a prolific and indefatigable correspondent, famous
for exhausting the five secretaries he maintained, simultaneously, at
the height of his power in the 1790s.
Employing groundbreaking archival research and a keen interpretive lens,
Sudhir Hazareesingh restores Toussaint to his full complexity in Black
Spartacus. At a time when his subject has, variously, been reduced to
little more than a one-dimensional icon of liberation or criticized for
his personal failings--his white mistresses, his early ownership of
slaves, his authoritarianism --Hazareesingh proposes a new conception of
Toussaint's understanding of himself and his role in the Atlantic world
of the late eighteenth century. Black Spartacus is a work of both
biography and intellectual history, rich with insights into Toussaint's
fundamental hybridity--his ability to unite European, African, and
Caribbean traditions in the service of his revolutionary aims.
Hazareesingh offers a new and resonant interpretation of Toussaint's
racial politics, showing how he used Enlightenment ideas to argue for
the equal dignity of all human beings while simultaneously insisting on
his own world-historical importance and the universal pertinence of
blackness--a message which chimed particularly powerfully among African
Americans.
Ultimately, Black Spartacus offers a vigorous argument in favor of
"getting back to Toussaint"--a call to take Haiti's founding father
seriously on his own terms, and to honor his role in shaping the
postcolonial world to come.
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize Finalist for the **PEN /
Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Named a best book of the year by the The Economist Times Literary
Supplement New Statesman**
