Wilberforce Institute Summer Debate 2023 

Research Area: Promoting Justice and Fairness for All
Featuring: Professor Trevor Burnard, Director of the Wilberforce Institute
John D. Garrigus, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington
Laurent Dubois, Professor of History and Co-Director of the Democracy Initiative at the University of Virginia
Dominique Rogers, Assistant Professor (MCF) of History at the University of the Antilles
Mélanie Lamotte, Assistant Professor of French and History at the University of Texas at Austin
Meleisa Ono-George, Brittenden Fellow in History at Queen’s College, Oxford
Dexnell Peters, Lecturer in Caribbean and Atlantic History at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
The origins of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 - the only successful enslaved revolt in history and a major event in the making of the modern world - remains shrouded in mystery. For French colonists in Saint Domingue, it sprang up without explanation as if it was a spontaneous event. In a hugely important new book, A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution, published this September by Harvard University Press, the distinguished historian of Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution, John Garrigus of the University of Texas at Arlington, shows that the start of the Haitian Revolution has a history based on slave resistance in the northern sugar producing plains of Saint Domingue. The Wilberforce Institute is proud to discuss this major intervention into the history of slavery and the Caribbean in this webinar.