A Secret among the Blacks

Offers a fresh perspective on the resistance of the enslaved…Focusing on individual figures such as the African-born Médor, [Garrigus] makes a plausible case for his revisionist version of the Makandal story and sheds a revealing light on the wider origins of the Haitian revolution. – Sudhir Hazareesingh * Times Literary Supplement *
One of the most exciting and important history books I read this year…Lucidly and grippingly written, Garrigus’s book is a model of historical scholarship, with vivid portraits of individual enslaved people. – David A. Bell * Chronicle of Higher Education *
Brilliant…challenges a core myth – that the revolution was a sudden eruption – revealing instead a gripping tale of a population on the path to revolution over decades, a story of communities of secret keepers resisting while building the loyalties that made the revolution, once ignited, a success. – Desirée Baptiste * Times Literary Supplement *
A compelling study of the Haitian Revolution’s immersion in the Atlantic diaspora, its ethnic diversity, and the rich medicinal culture derived from it. – Isadora Moura Mota * American Historical Review *
Makes a convincing case for a seemingly obvious, yet understudied, explanation for the Haitian Revolution. – Philippe Girard * Journal of Global Slavery *
A riveting read and a transformative contribution to our understanding of resistance and revolution in the Caribbean and the Atlantic World. Garrigus vividly brings us into a world shaped by the work of divining, healing, and resistance, showing us how this world nurtured the alternative visions for the future that ultimately made the Haitian Revolution imaginable—and therefore possible. – Laurent Dubois, author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
The clearest, most sophisticated account I have read of the cultures of resistance that would help fuel the Haitian Revolution. Garrigus shows that enslaved men and women developed a range of complex, long-term political visions and pursued them by organizing across plantations, a powerful response to the argument that plantation slavery, especially in the Caribbean, was so harsh that it blocked political development among the enslaved. This important book is essential reading for historians of the Atlantic world and African diaspora, and should be read widely outside the academy. – James Sidbury, author of Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic, 1760–1830
An engaging, sympathetic portrait of a population on the path to revolution. Drawing on sources very few historians have studied and linking familiar events in novel ways, Garrigus gives us an imaginative reworking of the theme of slave resistance and how it related to the Americas’ greatest slave uprising. – David Patrick Geggus, author of Haitian Revolutionary Studies
Concise, creative, and deeply researched. Combining ethnohistory with archival sleuthing, Garrigus uncovers communities of slave resistance in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the decades prior to the Haitian Revolution. African healing and ritual practices were not only used as a means of self-preservation in an atmosphere of chronic hunger, overwork, physical abuse, and disease; they also created communities among the enslaved that envisioned, and worked toward, a better world beyond the degradation of slavery. – Paul Cheney, author of Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue

John D. Garrigus is the author of Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue and coauthor of The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, 1740–1788. A former Andrew Carnegie Fellow, he is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington.

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