Description
Book SynopsisWinner 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 globeappearing on banknotes and in bronze, on T-shirts and in filmthe 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 sup
