In a State of Flight: The Struggle for Freedom in the Haitian Diaspora, 1791-1830

Frances Bell’s research examines follows several thousand people who were taken as slaves from revolutionary Haiti to the U.S. by enslavers fleeing the revolution. Her work examines how enslaved and formerly enslaved Haitians acquired legal knowledge and formed social networks as they sought out different forms of legal and extra-legal freedom, highlighting the precarity of legal freedom in the revolutionary Atlantic, and the centrality of mobility to the legalities of slavery.