This bilingual edition gathers the constitutions that governed Haiti and its colonial predecessor across seventy years, with an editorial introduction explaining where each printed text came from and why one version was preferred to another.

The sequence opens with Louverture's constitution of 1801, which formalised a governing structure already in place and made him the colony's sole legitimate voice to Paris; its promulgation brought the Leclerc expedition, and Louverture's death at the Fort de Joux. After independence, Dessalines's charter of 1805 declared an empire, entrenched the abolition of slavery — a clause repeated down to 1849 — barred white men from owning land, refused to name a dominant religion and permitted divorce.

Later documents swing between republic, empire and monarchy while returning to the same questions of citizenship, foreign landholding and religion. All insist on sovereignty, and all reassure foreign powers that Haiti had no intention of exporting its revolution.

Toussaint Louverture's constitution of 1801 usually appears as a footnote, overshadowed by his arrest, his deportation and the rise of Dessalines. Drexler and White make a larger claim for it. Once American newspapers circulated the text in the autumn of 1801, no text by a Black author was more widely read in the United States, they contend, and probably none was until Douglass published his Narrative in 1845.

They meet the objections head-on. The document was not written in the United States, not published there first, not about the country, and not authored by Toussaint in any conventional sense, having been drafted by a committee made up largely of white planters.

Their reply is that early African American writing is full of texts with tangled origins, Wheatley's London-printed poems among them, and that reading the constitution as literature shifts where the tradition can be said to begin.

Work on early nineteenth-century Haiti has leaned on the division between a mixed-race ancien libres caste and a black nouveaux libres caste. Gaffield does not dispute that the split shaped politics and daily life, but argues that reading the country's first constitutions systematically brings something else into view.

Four constitutions appeared between 1801 and 1807, each defining Haiti differently. What they hold in common is a portrayal of the new nation as cohesive — a single imagined community, articulated in the official language of the state rather than in the divided terms historians have stressed.

The Caribbean of these decades was already unsettling long-established European ideals in politics, society, and economy; the Haitian revolution emerged from that turbulence and generated further change. Gaffield presents the constitutional record as material for broader study of nineteenth-century nation-building in colonizing and colonized societies alike.