Caribbean and Circum Caribbean

The man who would dismantle the wealthiest slave colony in the Americas began his military career at nearly fifty years old, carrying the contradictions of a world he was destined to rupture.

The boy who may have drummed for French forces at the Siege of Savannah in 1779, and who reportedly spent his youth working as a mason, sailor, or stable hand in Saint-Domingue, would die bearing the title of King.

No other event in the history of the Atlantic world so radically upended the global order as the night of August 22, 1791, when enslaved Africans rose up in the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

An English nickname, "Book Man," traveled with an enslaved Muslim cleric from the West African coast of Senegambia to the sugar fields of the Caribbean.