Unlike the American and French revolutions, the Haitian Revolution was the first in a modern state to implement human rights universally and unconditionally. Combining archival research, political philosophy, and intellectual history, Nesbitt explores this fundamental event of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century--the invention of universal emancipation--both in the context of the Age of Enlightenment and in relation to certain key figures and trends in contemporary political philosophy. In doing so, he elucidates the theoretical implications of Haiti's revolution for both the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries.