The opening of the Haitian Revolution season. Duncan introduces the world's most profitable colony — Saint-Domingue — built entirely on slave labor, and the racial caste system that would eventually tear it apart.
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Highlights
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Extreme inequality creates the conditions for revolutionary violence
Saint-Domingue's wealth was built on the most brutal slave system in the Americas. 500,000 enslaved people, worked to death and replaced, generated wealth for 40,000 white colonists.
The Haitian Revolution proved universal ideals are universal — or they're not ideals
When French revolutionaries declared 'the rights of man,' enslaved Haitians took them at their word. The logic of universal rights couldn't be confined to white Europeans.