Toussaint L’Overture

This volume is one of the more significant contributions of the Great Lives Observed series. Toussaint Louverture has been sadly neglected by contemporary historians since he simultaneously influenced French, American and Caribbean history. This edition is the first comprehensive compendium of scholarship on the black revolutionary which includes a century of writing in both English and French (translated by the editor). Tyson’s introduction and chronology are adequate to acquaint students with the father of Haitian independence; however, the selections are weighed more toward an evaluation of Toussaint as an historical figure than as an attempt to understand him directly through primary sources. He emerges as a very controversial figure, surely important enough to merit more attention from scholars dealing with New World slavery. The book itself can be viewed as an annotated bibliography of scholarship on Toussaint and his influence on the history of the black man in the Americas, and is a useful complement to C.L.R. James’s, The Black Jacobins.