According to one strand of history, slavery was abolished when Europeans found their conscience. According to another, it was abolished when it stopped being profitable. Both approaches tend to underplay the significance of Black resistance.
In a revolution that upended ideas about white superiority, the enslaved Black people of the French Caribbean colony Saint-Domingue liberated themselves to create Haiti, the first free Black nation in the Americas. The country was established in 1804, after more than a decade of armed struggle. This historic victory is part of a long series of violent rebellions that regularly shook the Caribbean islands and undermined the transatlantic slave economy.
