It is impossible to understand capitalism without analyzing slavery, an institution that tied together three world regions: Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The exploitation of slave labor led to a form of proto-globalization in which violence was indispensable to the production of wealth.
Against the background of this expanding circulation of capital and slave labor, the first revolution in Latin America took place: the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and culminated with Haiti-s declaration of independence in 1804. Taking the Haitian Revolution as a paradigmatic case, Gr-ner shows that modernity is not a linear evolution from the center to the periphery but, rather, a co-production developed in the context of highly unequal power relations, where extreme forms of conquest and exploitation were an indispensable part of capital accumulation. He also shows that the Haitian Revolution opened up a path to a different kind of modernity, or -counter-modernity,- a path alo
