1791: (The Haitian Revolution as Catalyst: The Most Notable Insurrection of the Enslaved, Which Made Investors Uneasy and Disrupted the Economy Built on Slav…

1791: (The Haitian Revolution as Catalyst: The Most Notable Insurrection of the Enslaved, Which Made Investors Uneasy and Disrupted the Economy Built on Slavery): Resistance by the enslaved had long made investors uneasy, and mutinies on board ship were common enough, but the most notable insurrection of the enslaved was that on the island of Haiti in 1791, under Toussaint Louverture. The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that engulfed Europe between the early 1790s and 1815 had repercussions for international trade, severely disrupting global shipping lanes including those linking Africa and the Americas, and the slave trade never fully recovered. The Haitian Revolution, the only successful insurrection of the enslaved in the history of the Atlantic system, achieved by enslaved Africans who had been deported overwhelmingly from the very Bight of Benin ports and Dahomean hinterlands that Reid’s chapter describes, demonstrated to the entire Atlantic world that the enslaved were capable of resistance and of sovereign state-formation, and its reverberations through the abolitionist movement, through European economic calculations about the profitability of slave labor, and through the insurance markets that underwrote the Middle Passage made it one of the decisive catalysts in the transition from the slave trade to legitimate commerce that transformed nineteenth-century Atlantic Africa.