My dissertation reinterprets the ideological dispositions of black insurgents during the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), finding a strong tendency toward royalism rather than the republicanism destabilizing the Atlantic world. Employing ideas from throughout the region, Haiti’s revolutionaries drew inspiration from a wide web of imperial entanglements. I show this by examining the colonial frontier between French St. Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo, where ideas of loyalty were exchanged and put to the test. Ultimately, by arguing that the Haitian Revolution’s origins began as a counterrevolution, I seek to upset conventional teleologies of nation-state history. This way, I will add to a growing field that shows how broad and complex the study of politics can be by showing how subaltern loyalism shaped the course of history.