Starting with the 1791 slave insurrection, it is therefore not surprising that those who set about courageously, brilliantly and systematically destroying this system crafted particularly powerful assertions of human rights. Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of true universal values reached its defining climax during the Age of Revolution. Enslaved people who were considered chattel rather than human beings successfully insisted that they had the right to be free and, secondly, that they had the right to govern themselves according to a new set of principles. Their actions were a signal and a transformative moment in the political history of the world. The Haitian revolutionaries propelled the Enlightenment principles of universalism forward in unexpected ways by insisting on the self-evident – but then largely denied – principle that no one should be a slave. And they did so at the very heart of the world’s economic system, turning the most profitable colony in the world into an independent nation founded on the refusal of the system of slavery that dominated all the societies that surrounded it in the Americas.