Key
At the selected date, the colour of each place shows who held it. To learn its story, click or tap a country or marker.
Drag to move · scroll to zoom · click a country or marker
To move the map on a touch screen, drag it. Pinch to zoom, or double-tap to zoom in.
Two centuries separate the struggles for independence in Saint-Domingue and Kenya. Each produced a nation whose people had to decide what freedom would mean. Saint-Domingue was the richest colony on earth when half a million enslaved people rose in 1791. They defeated Spain, Britain and Napoleon’s army, and in 1804 founded Haiti, the first state created by people who had freed themselves from slavery. In Kenya, settlers took the highlands, while the colonial state took the labour of the people who had farmed them. The struggle over land erupted in the Emergency of the 1950s and ended with independence in 1963.
The twelve chapters follow these two roads to independence and then bring them together. Who counted as a citizen in each new nation? What did its leaders make of freedom, what did independence cost, and how is the war remembered? On the map, red marks independence won, tan marks colonial rule, and charcoal shows the plantation and settler land at the centre of the two stories. Scrub the timeline and open any territory’s dossier; then sit the Field Exam when you can explain how the way each country won its freedom shaped what followed.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
You can return to the library of twenty-one atlases at any time: select the balloon at the top left.