This chapter takes us back to the waving line at the border between slavery and freedom, and to the emergence of universal freedom as the opposite of slavery as the slaves in Haiti materialised as subjects who could transform the world. Ideas about freedom in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries developed in the contexts of slavery existing inside the forwardness of modernity, and of shifting relations of domination and subordination between Europeans and the rest of the world. This is a complicated space where the revolutionary events in Haiti swim in and out of focus, sometimes thinkable and sometimes unthinkable, and the slaves themselves appear as liminal beings in Hegel's master/slave dialectic (Hegel 1976) until Frederick Douglass brings them forcefully to life. As Paul Gilroy has shown, it is important to consider the relationship between master and slave as characteristically modern, and to explore the ways in which ‘the universality and rationality of enlightened Europe and America were used to sustain and relocate rather than eradicate an order of racial difference inherited from the premodern era’ (Gilroy 1993, 49). This association of modernity and slavery is, for Gilroy, a fundamental conceptual issue that deeply unsettles the idea of history as progress and shows us how plantation slavery ‘provided the foundations for a distinctive network of economic, social, and political relations’ (Gilroy 1993, 55). The conditions of this modern social life were understood to deform and dehumanise individuals, and in the process, the humanity of the human came to be understood as an achievement, rather than a species-specific characteristic (Scott 2004, 91). This entailed new understandings of freedom and history which, as David Scott argues, introduced new ways of thinking about the failings of social institutions and suggested that the sources of those failings could be historical and, therefore, changeable (Scott 2004, 92). In the revolutionary moment at the end of the eighteenth century, the clash of the zones of freedom and unfreedom created shifting and unstable ground for slavery and for modernity, and the new sense of humanity that was forged by Kant, Hegel and Douglass did not always light a clear path to freedom.