Toussaint was a product of the especially modern conditions of the colonial plantation complex: he had a personal memory of bondage that would not allow for compromise with Napoleon’s attempts to recapture Saint-Domingue, and yet he was also a statesman formed in part by the ideals of the European Enlightenment, and couldn’t envisage his society developing in complete independence from a France that he viewed as “the highest state of civilization.” James did not see this as weakness on Toussaint’s part, or as a willing submission to the stultifying logics of reason and progress. His dilemma was simply borne out of the conditions in which he had to operate. For Scott, Toussaint’s vexed relationship to the Enlightenment is shared in the 21st century by third-world intellectuals, for whom “modernity” is both a blessing and a curse that can neither simply be escaped from nor endorsed.