Right-wing paramilitary violence in Haiti is Sprague's subject, and his case is that it has worked steadily against the democratic hopes of ordinary Haitians.

He begins in 1990, the year Jean-Bertrand Aristide became Haiti's first democratically elected president, and traces the reactionary movements that succeeded in forcing him from office. Over the two decades that followed, the violence fell mainly on the poor and on people aligned with Aristide's Lavalas movement, and it cost thousands of Haitian lives.

Gros works through Haiti's condition as a case in the study of failed states. The book first asks what the concept of state failure actually means, then places Haiti's version of it in historical perspective.

From there it offers a rational-choice account of Duvalierism, follows the disorder and foreign intervention that came after the Duvaliers, and weighs geological catastrophe against an enfeebled state. A closing chapter takes up what remaking a failed state would require, in theory and in policy.

Scheidel's volume introduces the workings of the Roman imperial economy for readers at any level, pairing its chapters with further material online. The organising questions are what drove Roman economic development, what shape it took, and what followed from it.

Five sections carry the argument: economic theory applied to antiquity, the organisation of labour, the making of goods and of power, the channels through which things moved, from markets at one end to plunder at the other, and finally the economy's successes and its eventual failure.

Familiar subjects such as slavery, the food supply and coinage get their due, but the collection presses hardest on matters earlier surveys passed over: human capital, the generation of energy, the extraction of rent, the logistics of moving goods, and how well people actually lived. On the contested question of Roman trade, five specialists are convened to argue it out.

Beard announces his purpose at the outset: to prove through narrative rather than argument that no fixed barrier separates light- and dark-skinned peoples, and that a despised race is capable of heroism and virtue. Toussaint's life is the vehicle.

The story opens with the island's geography and moves through the collision of planters, free men of colour and the enslaved after 1789: the deputation of men of colour to Paris, the colonial assembly's refusal to share power, Ogé's rising, and the great revolt of the northern plain. Toussaint appears first as the Bréda coachman who shields his master's household, then as the commander who outmanoeuvres his rivals, and finally as the prisoner left to starve in the Jura after Bonaparte's betrayal.

Later chapters carry the account past independence, through Dessalines, the division between Christophe and Pétion, and Boyer's reunification, down to the Haiti of the author's own century.

The years from 1789 to 1804 in Saint-Domingue roused enslaved people and alarmed planters across the Atlantic world. Ghachem resists reading the period only as a clean break with slavery, presenting emancipation in Haiti instead as something that grew out of the colony's legal history over a long span.

The study works beneath the letter of the law into how it was actually used, and stages particular episodes at length, among them the extraordinary case in which a master was prosecuted for torturing and killing the people he owned.

Old Regime law turns out to have been invoked from several directions at once during the revolutionary years. Administrators reached for it hoping to hold the colony steady; free people of color and enslaved people reached for it to claim citizenship and demand an end to brutality. What emerges is a portrait of colonial governance as a field of strategy in the land that became Haiti.

The first installment of Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs, published in 1999, covers the road to Singapore's independence as told by the leader who made the small island state internationally consequential.

Lee writes at close range about the three sets of opponents he contended with: colonial administrators, communists, and those mobilizing along communal lines. He describes maneuvering among them with considerable political skill, at times drawing an adversary into cooperation and at times confronting him outright, with Singapore's advantage always the object.

Among the episodes recounted are his leadership of unionists on strike against the colonial authorities and the relationships he cultivated over tea and rounds of golf.

As a young anthropologist Mintz worked in Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico; fifty years on he returns to those experiences and to the islanders who befriended him. The reflections trace what runs continuously through the three societies and what separates them, and show people bringing their own history to light.

He joins what he knows of each island's past — made by a meeting of peoples with few parallels anywhere in human experience — to how the people he met talked about their lives. In Haiti and Jamaica, he argues, creolization was an immense act of creation by the enslaved: cultures did not simply mix, they were rebuilt, with new hybrid institutions and meanings put where enslavement had left wreckage. Globalization, read this way, is far older than it is assumed to be.

The book gathers up Mintz's long work in the region.

Beasley follows four women who sell street food in Jacmel, Haiti, and asks what happens when work that is officially off the books becomes the way a family eats.

The setting is a shadow economy, not criminal enterprise but ordinary law-abiding people earning outside formal channels, in a world where people and money keep moving across borders. Food is where a great deal of women's economic activity happens, which makes it worth examining on its own terms.

One reading of such informal work is that it merely restages a familiar patriarchy. The vendors in this ethnography suggest otherwise. Their arrangements feed large numbers of people more efficiently than government programmes manage, hold a community together, and give the women themselves a sense of agency, mutual support, and a dense network of contacts.

When the insurgent commander Macaya told a French commissioner in 1793 that he was subject to the kings of Congo, France and Spain, historians from Madiou onward took it as proof that the rebels were burdened with an African attachment to monarchy, something backward that Louverture had patiently to talk them out of.

Thornton takes the statement seriously instead. Perhaps two-thirds of Saint-Domingue's enslaved population had been born and raised in Africa, many of them in Kongo, and he reconstructs what kingship meant there in order to read their politics as a coherent ideology rather than nostalgia.

His evidence includes insurgents electing kings and queens quarter by quarter as they took territory, a ceremony at L'Acul conducted by a Capuchin, which points to Kongolese Christianity, the conqueror-king manner of certain commanders and the terror they used, and the Kikongo chant recorded by Moreau de Saint-Mery, whose translation scholars have fought over for decades.

Joseph surveys the recent wave of literary and historiographical writing on the Haitian Revolution and assesses what it has changed.

The starting point is what the revolution accomplished: formerly enslaved Africans founded a state without slavery, wrote a permanent ban on colonial slavery into the republic's first constitution, and asserted equality and human rights for all people. Dessalines, who took over as general in chief after Toussaint Louverture, proclaimed Haiti on the first day of 1804, following years of fighting against France, Spain, and Britain.

The central claim is that scholarship in North America has undergone an intellectual shift Joseph names the Haitian Turn. He reads the revolution as both a world event and a reference point for present arguments about equality, social justice, freedom, and universal human rights, closing with suggestions about where the field should go next. The piece offers itself as selective critical reflection rather than an exhaustive review.

Bellegarde-Smith approaches the January 2010 earthquake as one entry in a long series rather than an isolated catastrophe. Haiti sits on unstable ground and has absorbed shocks of both natural and human making since its colonial beginnings and through its life as a sovereign state.

The country, he notes, was already engaged in remaking itself politically, socially, and culturally in the years after the Duvalier dictatorship ended in 1986, following three decades of family rule begun in 1957. The quake added physical reconstruction to that unfinished work, and prompts him to ask whether the endurance Haitians are so often praised for has a limit.

Writing from a Haitian vantage point, Bellegarde-Smith examines what followed the event Haitians named Goudougoudou, setting it beside the other trials that have tested the country across two centuries.

King reconstructs the social world of free people of colour in Saint-Domingue up to 1791, the year his notarial sources give out. They made up a substantial share of the colony's free men, filled the ranks of the rural constabulary almost entirely after mid-century, and carried much of the burden of defence once it was clear that whites would not serve in the militia.

Military service is the central thread. The Chasseurs-Volontaires who fought at Savannah in 1779 supplied nearly a third of that expedition's ground strength, and officials and community spokesmen alike urged enlistment as a way to claim equal standing and to give the lie to white assumptions about them — a claim soured when the survivors were scattered as Caribbean garrisons for years afterwards. King is deliberately cautious about the link to the revolution: he can identify only a handful of Chasseurs who certainly fought in it, and offers parallels rather than causes.

Written after the 2010 earthquake, this report begins from the observation that Haiti had been improving before the disaster — several years of growth and slowly better governance — and that recovery therefore turns on policy rather than luck.

Its method is appraisal rather than invention. Plans already produced by the Haitian government and its donors are examined function by function: public administration, justice, policing, economic and fiscal policy, infrastructure, education, health care, and finally the coordination of donors themselves. Police reform, the authors note, has produced real gains in crime and public trust, while courts and prisons have not; private and religious providers carry most of the burden in schooling and medicine.

Recommendations are held to stated tests. They must be affordable, within the government's actual administrative capacity, achievable within three to five years, mutually consistent, and aimed at making the Haitian state effective rather than deepening its reliance on outsiders.

Slave revolt was never more frequent in the Americas than between the 1770s and the 1840s, and Geggus places Curacao's insurrection of 1795, and its strange sequel five years later, inside that wave. He begins by admitting how slippery the counting is: no complete census of revolts and conspiracies exists, and even the threshold for calling an act a rebellion is contested.

What emerges is a picture of causes that are more tangled than the obvious one. Insurgents in the French colonies rarely spoke of the rights of man; they said instead that freedom had already been granted them, whether by the king or by the deputies in Paris, and comparable rumours of a concealed emancipation law drove more than twenty revolts through to the 1830s.

Geggus weighs the French Revolution's disruption of colonial authority, the example of Saint-Domingue becoming Haiti, and an abolitionist movement that predated both and outlasted them.

The inauguration of the first Black president of the United States in January 2009 sent many Haitians, and many friends of Haiti, thinking back to another January. In 1804 Jean-Jacques Dessalines became the first Black leader of a nation in the New World, and Jenson's chapter takes that echo as its opening.

Dessalines came to power just as the new country marked its independence with a formal declaration. Jenson sets that document beside the American one, which Jefferson described as an instrument carrying within it the fate of the world, and turns from there to what David Armitage has observed about Haiti's place in the history of such declarations.

Padgett and Warnecke take up a problem the 2010 earthquake made visible but did not create: Haiti's development had been faltering for decades before the ground shook. Their diagnosis centers on the unequal position of women, and they propose human development theory as the framework most likely to produce change.

The article sets out recent decades of Haitian economic history alongside the state of women's rights there and the divergent social and economic outcomes men and women experience. From that base it examines how leaving gender equity out of policy has fed the country's record of development failure.

The closing section turns comparative, drawing on developing countries that have built attention to gender equity into their development strategies, including after disasters and during financial crises. The aim is a body of practice, grounded in institutionalist economics, that connects gender inequality to economic development.

Georges Anglade's map of La Diaspora is the point of departure for this collection, which takes his blueprint for studying Haitian settlement abroad and asks what geography does to migration and to the positions Haitians occupy once they arrive. Jackson resists treating diaspora as a seamless web of connection; the contributors do not assume the term means anything in particular to the people they study, asking instead how it is used locally and to what end.

Three parts organise the essays. The first follows movement within the Caribbean, from exile in Jamaica and marginality in Guadeloupe to exclusion in the Dominican Republic, rural enclaves in eastern Cuba and the Bahamas as a way station, where moving is often a sideways step rather than an escape.

The second turns to Paris, Boston, Michigan and the machinery of deportation. The third treats diaspora itself as a way of mapping the world.

Casimir reads two centuries of Haitian history as a struggle between two sovereignties. Africans brought to the island in the last decades of French rule were never fully controlled by the colonial administration, and out of that opening they built their own institutions, their own language and an autonomous space inside the plantation system, the pressure that finally broke the colony apart.

Independence did not settle the matter. The oligarchy that took over preserved the colonial right to use and abuse property, treated national independence as a substitute for popular freedom, and looked abroad rather than to the habitants for the knowledge to govern. The American occupation of 1915 completed the reversal, and the civilizing tasks the ruling class would not perform itself were handed first to a foreign clergy and later to foreign NGOs.

Recovering that suppressed store of experience, Casimir proposes, means joining Haitians' search for self-expression to comparable efforts elsewhere in the global South.

Hegel wrote the master and slave dialectic while the only successful slave revolution in history was being reported across Europe, including in the journal he read. Buck-Morss argues the connection is plain, and that the burden of proof falls on those who deny it. The passage from servitude to a constitutional state, won by a struggle for recognition fought under the banner of liberty or death, is what lifts his analysis out of colonial political economy and into world history proper.

The larger subject is the silence. Two centuries of scholarship kept philosopher and revolution apart, and she asks how disciplines build objects of study that conceal as much as they show. Explanations for his own reticence range from Freemasonry and political danger to the disorder of his life at Jena.

Restoring the link, she insists, is not a footnote about sources. Modern philosophies of freedom cannot be done well in ignorance of Haitian history.

Johnson assesses Ashli White's study of the Saint-Domingue refugees who reached American ports between 1793 and 1809, and of what their presence did to political argument in the young United States. White's claim, as he presents it, is that these arrivals, white and black, reshaped debate over national character, migration policy, factional politics and slavery's place in a republic.

He follows her through the chapters: the shared creoleness white refugees invoked to attract charity, the philanthropy withheld from exiles of colour, the public quarrel between the emigres and the French minister Genet that left Americans doubting French republicanism, the fear of contagion that slaveholders soothed by congratulating themselves on their own humanity, and the last wave in 1809, whose insistence on landing with their property forced Congress into an exemption from the slave trade ban.

Johnson counts it a corrective for a field slow to take Haiti's emergence seriously.