Silencing the Past: How Haiti Was Forgotten

In Silencing the Past (1995), the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that the Haitian Revolution was 'unthinkable' to many Europeans even as it happened, because it contradicted their assumptions about race and slavery. Afterward, he argued, histories silenced it, either by ignoring it or by treating it as a minor episode of the French Revolution. Trouillot showed that silences enter history at several stages: when sources are created, when archives are assembled, when narratives are written, and when significance is assigned. C. L. R.

James's The Black Jacobins (1938) had earlier presented the revolution as a central event of the age, but it took decades for textbooks to follow. This lesson matters for comparison because which revolutions are counted shapes theory: Brinton's 1938 model and Palmer's early Atlantic framework largely left Haiti out, so their generalizations rested on incomplete samples.