A Turbulent Time

The impact of the French and Haitian revolutions on slave societies of the Greater Caribbean.

Examines developments within several societies in the Greater Caribbean during the revolutionary period to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutions on the region. This book looks at several dimensions of the impact of the two interconnected revolutions on what may be called the Greater Caribbean.

"Stimulating, incisive, insightful, sometimes revisionist, this volume is required reading for historians of comparative colonialism in an age of revolution." —Choice

"[An] eminently original and intellectually exciting book." —William and Mary Quarterly

This volume examines several slave societies in the Greater Caribbean to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutionary age on the region. Built precariously on the exploitation of slave labor, organized according to the doctrine of racial discrimination, the plantation colonies were particularly vulnerable to the message of the French Revolution, which proved all the more potent because it coincided with the emergence of the antislavery movement in the Atlantic world and interacted with local traditions of resistance among the region's slaves, free coloreds, and white colonists.