A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. By Laurent Dubois. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 452; 24 illustrations, 4 maps. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper. Published the year of Haiti's bicentenary of independence and winner of the American Historical Association's 2004 Prize Atlantic History, and its 2004 John Edwin Fagg Prize, Laurent Dubois' recent book, A Colony of Citizens, stands as a milestone the ever-expanding historiography of Atlantic slave emancipation. Using the French revolutionary Caribbean as its focal point, it masterfully binds together into a single dialectical narrative the proclaimed universalism of France's Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the active agency of colonial ex-slaves to appropriate for themselves the rights of citizenship and thereby define the meaning of freedom. Combining the methodologies of history, anthropology, and literary criticism, Dubois uses a wide range of archival sources, contemporary manuscripts, and secondary literature from these disciplines to demonstrate how the slaves and their free colored counterparts were not only architects of their own liberation, but also how they influenced the terms by which the French Revolution defined, and redefined, itself. Here France's slaves-turned-citizens exposed the tensions and contradictions embedded the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen between the natural rights of the Enlightenment and the property rights inherent individual liberty. By claiming as their own and winning the natural rights of all human beings, they radicalized the Declaration, yet, at the same time, both the metropolitan and the local authorities charged with implementing the colonial post-emancipation regimes undermined its universalism favor of continuing plantation-based colonialism, coerced labor, and the denial of full citizenship rights to the newly emancipated on racialist grounds. Thus France's dilemma of justifying republicanism and colonial imperialism, liberty and plantation labor, equality and racial differentiation resulted a peculiar kind of policy that Dubois defines as Republican racism. In exposing the inherent problems and contradictions of revolutionary universalism from both sides of the Atlantic, Dubois rewrites the history of the first French Republic on the formative questions of liberty, equality, and citizenship. He focuses his study on Guadeloupe while linking it to revolutionary Saint Domingue and weaves the microhistory of the Afro-Guadeloupean communities, their struggles for emancipation and equality, into the broader context of the revolutionary Atlantic and the emerging political culture of the age. The book itself is divided into three parts. In the first, Prophecy, Revolt, and Emancipation, 1781-1794, he deals with the pre-emancipation period and uses the slave revolts at Sainte Anne and Trois-Rivieres to show how the slaves themselves forcibly expanded the limits of republican citizenship in defense of the nation and helped to hasten the coming of general emancipation 1794. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".