islands like Barbados and Jamaica were far more important in their day than were the English colonies that would become the United States. The nation now known as Haiti, even more so. In the eighteenth century it became the richest colony in history, and in the nineteenth, by dint of its slave population’s successful revolution, Haiti rivaled the United States in terms of its influence on the world, notably in helping fulfill the most fundamental Enlightenment value of all, ending slavery.
