Haitian Revolution
The only slave revolt in history to found a state, which destroyed Napoleon's American empire and was punished for it for 140 years.
In 1791 the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue, the richest colony on earth, rose against their owners. Thirteen years later they had defeated the French, the Spanish, and the British, abolished slavery, and declared an independent state. It is the only successful slave revolt in recorded history to produce a country, and its consequences reached into North America, Latin America, and the entire nineteenth-century argument about whether people held in bondage could govern themselves.
The richest colony in the world
Saint-Domingue, the western third of Hispaniola, produced a huge share of the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and was worth more to France than Canada by an enormous margin. It ran on around half a million enslaved Africans, against roughly forty thousand whites and a similar number of free people of color. The mortality rate was so high that the plantation system required constant new imports to maintain the workforce. This was, by common assessment, the most brutal slave regime in the Americas.
It was also unstable in a way the planters did not see. The enslaved majority vastly outnumbered everyone else, many had been born free in Africa and had military experience, and the free people of color, some of them wealthy property owners, were legally humiliated by a color line that gave them no political rights. The French Revolution's declaration that men are born free and equal in rights landed on that arrangement in 1789 and cracked it open.
The revolt and the general
The uprising began in the northern plains in August 1791. Within weeks a thousand plantations were burning. What turned a revolt into a revolution was the emergence of leaders who could think strategically about a world war.
Toussaint Louverture, born enslaved and freed in his thirties, understood that the colony's fate depended on which European power he fought for at any given moment. He fought for Spain against France, then switched to France when the revolutionary government abolished slavery in 1794, drove out the Spanish and then the British, and by 1801 governed the entire island. He issued a constitution making himself governor for life while formally keeping Saint-Domingue French, a document that dared Paris to object.
Napoleon objected. In 1802 he sent an expedition under his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to restore French control and, in due course, slavery. Toussaint was tricked into a meeting, seized, and shipped to a fortress in the Jura, where he died of cold and neglect in April 1803. The betrayal ended the possibility of compromise. Under Jean-Jacques Dessalines the war became one of extermination on both sides, and yellow fever destroyed the French army, killing the great majority of the tens of thousands of European troops sent, Leclerc among them. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared independence and gave the country its indigenous Taino name, Haiti.
The price
The strategic consequences were immediate and enormous. Napoleon had intended Louisiana as the granary for a restored Caribbean empire. Without Saint-Domingue it was worthless, and he sold it to the United States in 1803 for about fifteen million dollars. The Haitian revolutionaries doubled the size of the country that would become the world's dominant power, and got nothing for it.
What they got instead was isolation. The United States, with its own enslaved population and its own planters watching, refused to recognize Haiti until 1862. France sent a fleet in 1825 and demanded an indemnity of 150 million francs to compensate the former slaveholders for their lost property, meaning the people themselves, in exchange for recognition. Haiti, blockaded and friendless, agreed, and borrowed from French banks to make the first payment. The sum was reduced to 60 million in 1838, and roughly 112 million francs was paid in the end, but the loans taken out to service it were not fully retired until 1947. A country founded by formerly enslaved people spent its first century and a half paying its former owners for the crime of freeing itself.
That is the reason Haiti appears in discussions of failed states today, and it is the reason those discussions are usually shallow. The revolution proved that the enslaved could destroy the most profitable slave system on earth and build a state. The century that followed proved that the international system could bankrupt them for it without firing a shot.