About

I’m Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington.

My scholarship focuses on the preconditions of the Haitian Revolution, with special attention to race, the environment, and the lives of enslaved people. The New York Times cited me in their series explaining how Haitians paid France a massive “ransom”  for the independence they won in the Revolution.

In Spring 2023 Harvard University Press is wrapping up production on my book “A Secret Among the Blacks”:  Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution.  Publication is scheduled for September 2023. The book charts three decades of resistance and environmental turmoil in the region where the Haitian Revolution began. It provides a new interpretation  of the so-called Makandal poison plot of 1757-58. New archival discoveries show how the world’s only successful slave revolution grew out of people’s attempts to survive zoonotic disease, oppression, and malicious prosecutions. An Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2019-21) and a year at the National Humanities Center (2017-18) allowed me to write most of this work.

You can see some of this research in my William & Mary Quarterly article about the devastating impact of livestock disease on enslaved people in Saint-Domingue’s North Province. It appeared in October 2021 issue.

UTA Research Profile; Google Scholar Profile

Contact me at:
Department of History
Box 19529
University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington TX 76019-0529
UTA History Office: (817) 272-2861
Garrigus@uta.edu