There is going to be continuous engagement and I think you've got some of the guerrilla warfare ideas. You also have this fantastic thing called disease and it's going to have a huge impact and it will actually be a strategy. Everyone will know that there is a danger of actually going out and fighting during a particular time of the year because there will be mosquitoes. If you think of that as an actual military strategy which is says don't do anything, just let them go out and they will kill themselves, it actually works. Can you tell us what happened here? When they're going to have their interaction. What did you do at this stage? It's a big force to land on an
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Haitian Revolution. In 1791 an uprising began in the French colonial territory of St Domingue. Partly a consequence of the French Revolution and partly a backlash against the brutality of slave owners, it turned into a complex struggle involving not just the residents of the island but French, English and Spanish forces. By 1804 the former slaves had won, establishing the first independent state in Latin America and the first nation to be created as a result of a successful slave rebellion. But the revolution also created one of the world's most impoverished societies, a legacy which Haiti has struggled to escape.
Contributors
Kate Hodgson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in French at the University of Liverpool
Tim Lockley, Reader in American Studies at the University of Warwick
Karen Salt, Fellow in History in the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen
Producer: Luke Mulhall.