Hayti was the measure: Anti-Black racism and the echoes of Empire in Josiah Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty

In 1814, Baron de Vastey wrote in The Colonial System Unveiled: “When Europeans came to the new world, their first steps were accompanied by crimes on a grand scale, massacres, the destruction of empires, the obliteration of entire nations from the ranks of the living” (de Vastey 84). Jean Louis Vastey was a Black Haytien man born in 1781, who assumed the role of an administrator in Hayti after Jean-Jacques Dessalines freed the island from European rule. The Haytien Revolution, which was fought from 1791 to 1804, is the origin of Black theories of liberation from the nineteenth century.