Abstract
Eduardo Grüner explores the Haitian Revolution as a political and philosophical response to Eurocentric Enlightenment modernity and as a radical rejection of slavery and Western capitalism. From the start of his analysis, Grüner painstakingly establishes the difference between the slavery that existed in the Americas (modern slavery), particularly in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, and forms of slavery that existed in Europe in pre-modern times (ancient slavery). Fundamentally, the difference is that slavery in the Americas was particularly racialised and constituted the central basis for the capitalist system, unlike slavery in ancient Europe where the slave shared the master's skin colour and benefited from treatment of partial humanity. Using a Marxist framework, Grüner describes the slave as simultaneously the embodiment of labour power and a means of production, central components of capitalism. The slave trade facilitated the expansion of the nascent capitalist system and the beginning process of its globalisation.