Geggus weighs how much the age of revolution actually changed the Caribbean, and finds the answer uneven. Only one colony, Saint-Domingue, became independent before the 1840s; elsewhere imperial rule held, and the number of enslaved people in the region in 1840 was barely below what it had been in 1760, with Cuba and Puerto Rico still importing Africans illegally and expanding fast.

Emancipation, he notes, owed at least as much to metropolitan abolitionism as to revolt: the British act of 1833 freed more people than the Haitian Revolution had, and the ending of legal racial discrimination across most colonies between 1828 and 1832 came through reform rather than rising. The region's economic eclipse had more to do with Brazil, Mauritius and European beet sugar than with political violence.

Recent scholarship's stress on Caribbean agency, including claims that slave resistance drove European antislavery, receives a sympathetic but sceptical hearing.

Toussaint Louverture's constitution of 1801 usually appears as a footnote, overshadowed by his arrest, his deportation and the rise of Dessalines. Drexler and White make a larger claim for it. Once American newspapers circulated the text in the autumn of 1801, no text by a Black author was more widely read in the United States, they contend, and probably none was until Douglass published his Narrative in 1845.

They meet the objections head-on. The document was not written in the United States, not published there first, not about the country, and not authored by Toussaint in any conventional sense, having been drafted by a committee made up largely of white planters.

Their reply is that early African American writing is full of texts with tangled origins, Wheatley's London-printed poems among them, and that reading the constitution as literature shifts where the tradition can be said to begin.

Spears and Berotte Joseph assemble the first wide-ranging treatment of a language long kept in the shade by French. Specialists in Creole studies contribute chapters on where the language came from, how it is built, and how it works in schooling, in literature, and in ordinary exchange.

Nearly every Haitian speaks Creole, yet it gained standing as a co-official language of Haiti only some two decades before this volume appeared. The editors address teachers, service providers and Creole speakers who want the language used more widely in Haiti and among Haitians abroad.

Their argument is practical: stronger competence in the language would improve the education of its speakers and their ability to take part in the political and social life of the countries where they live.

Reid follows three Maryland cases, decided between 1812 and 1820, to show a state moving within two decades from enlarging black freedom to writing proslavery doctrine into its courts.

Petitioners of Haitian origin pressed an argument few others could make: that the French decree of 1794 had freed them, and that Maryland owed comity to the law of the territory they came from. Early on the bench was receptive, treating illegal importation as grounds for freedom in the spirit of Somerset. As alarm over the rebellion in Haiti spread and the Missouri Compromise hardened the categories of slave and free soil, the reception changed; by the last of the three cases the slaveholder's claim prevailed outright.

Those decisions, Reid argues, laid groundwork for the refusal of comity between states that Dred Scott would complete, and they expose a state that could not decide whether it was slave or free.

Morgan and Reid begin by conceding that any history of Islam must cut its subject by period and by region, and that both cuts are arbitrary without being meaningless. Their volume takes the eastern Islamic lands from the eleventh century, when Saljuq incursions mark a real break.

Two developments organize the account. The first is the arrival of the steppe peoples. Turks had earlier entered Muslim society as individually purchased soldiers, valued precisely because they arrived without kin or local loyalties; now whole tribes came, leaders and nomadic order intact. Turkish and Turko-Mongol dynasties then ruled much of the region into the nineteenth century, and no monarch of Persian descent governed Iran between the Saljuqs and Reza Shah.

The second is maritime. Islam travelled the Indian Ocean with Sufi scholars and merchants instead of armies, meeting religious traditions comfortable with many outward forms of one reality, a pluralism al-Biruni had already remarked on.

The slave revolt that destroyed Saint-Domingue did not end when Dessalines declared independence in 1804. Clavin follows its afterlife in American memory, and argues that the memory did political work.

Two accounts of the revolution circulated on both sides of the Atlantic, and neither was neutral. One, given wide currency by the Jamaican planter Bryan Edwards, dwelt on massacred white families and served slaveholders as a standing warning. The other made Louverture a general and statesman worth admiring. Both were retold in newspapers, pamphlets, engravings, taverns and shipboard talk, and both were fiercely disputed.

Clavin's larger claim is that the revolution's reach cannot be measured within its own decade. Seventy years on, Americans fighting their own war over slavery reached for Haiti, as promise or as threat, and he sets out to restore that link to the history of the Atlantic world.

Joseph Bunel served Toussaint Louverture and then Dessalines as a diplomatic and commercial envoy; Marie Bunel, born Fanchette Estève, spent her adult life trading in Cap Français and later Philadelphia. Girard reconstructs both careers from French, British and American archives.

He was a white Frenchman, she a free black Creole, but the argument is that ambition and money shaped their paths more than race did. After years there as a merchant and plantation manager, Joseph took an administrative role under Louverture from 1798, negotiating terms of trade and non-aggression with Britain and the Americans while the Quasi-War ran, before serving as paymaster. That proximity to the regime got him deported when the Leclerc expedition arrived.

Marie, already prosperous before 1791, kept trading straight through the revolution; closeness to Louverture and Henri Christophe never became political engagement. Persecuted with her husband, she rebuilt her business in Philadelphia and returned to Haiti only in 1810, after which the record thins out.

Popkin builds a book around one afternoon. On 20 June 1793 in Cap Francais, free men of colour ran through the streets telling the city's slaves they were free. Outnumbered by mutinous sailors and by the general France had dispatched to fight the insurgents, the republican commissioners had appealed to the enslaved majority for support.

For the first time, agents of a European power took a step pointing toward the end of slavery; the Convention decreed abolition in February 1794 as a direct consequence. White survivors remembered instead the burning of the richest port in France's colonies: three days of fighting killed between three and ten thousand people, more than any comparable episode in revolutionary Paris.

The consequences spread. Planters called in Britain and Spain, turning the colony into a front in the European war, while free people of colour found their victory bound up with the arming of citizens they had not meant to create.

Popkin argues that the Haitian insurrection deserves the same close attention to turning points that historians give the American and French revolutions, and that no episode was more decisive than the days beginning 20 June 1793 in Cap Francais.

He stresses how unforeseen the outcome was. Those who rose in the North province in August 1791 appear to have wanted extra days each week to work for themselves rather than an end to slavery; by 1792 Biassou was promising to put the French king back on his throne. On the morning of 20 June nobody in the colony or in France, not the insurgents, not their generals, not the free people of color, not the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel, was calling for general emancipation.

By that evening Sonthonax had issued the first emancipation decree from an official of any Western empire. Within three days the city had burned, thousands were dead, and refugees were scattering to the United States.

Every 18 May Haiti marks the day Dessalines cut the white band out of the tricolor and Catherine Flon stitched what remained into a flag. Girard finds almost nothing in the archives to support the scene, and reason to doubt even its date and location.

Madiou, writing in 1847, gave the first detailed version and placed the design earlier, prompted by Petion after the French captured a rebel color and published a pamphlet claiming the insurgents had no thought of independence. Ardouin, more skeptical, kept the order and dropped the swordplay. Later writers preferred the theatrical telling and added to it, Flon included, in ways that track whether the author wished to credit Dessalines or Petion.

The archival record yields a less expected finding. Haiti's flag and its other emblems borrow heavily from French revolutionary iconography, and through most of 1803 the leadership presented itself as the defender of emancipation rather than as the enemy of white people.

Toussaint Louverture governed Saint-Domingue as a virtually independent ruler from late 1798 until early 1802, yet his record as a statesman has drawn far less attention than the slave revolt that raised him. Girard works through British, French, Spanish, Cuban and American archives to argue that a literature built on United States policy papers has left Louverture receiving other people's decisions rather than pursuing designs of his own.

Those designs were neither the export of revolt nor a straight march to independence. He declined to attack the slave colonies around him, courted London and Washington for trade and for the arms he needed against Rigaud in the south, and stopped short of severing the tie to France. A planter and slave owner himself before 1791, he bound the survival of emancipation to his own survival in office.

The four-way manoeuvring that resulted, among Britain, France, the United States and Saint-Domingue, held for years before collapsing in 1802.

Oliver studies a class of portable sacred objects — cemís — that the native peoples of the Greater Antilles treated as living, potent beings rather than as representations. His question is what their scatter across the islands reveals about the ties among the people who owned, inherited, gave away and seized them.

He concentrates on large three-pointed stones, stone heads, stone collars, elbow stones and the face-masks called guaízas, most of them now in museum collections, and reads them against sixteenth-century Spanish accounts, above all the report Ramón Pané compiled for Columbus. Theories of gift exchange and of personhood, drawn largely from Melanesian ethnography, supply the framework.

Along the way Oliver revises the cultural scheme inherited from Irving Rouse and reconsiders what the word Taíno can properly be made to carry, before turning to the struggles over these objects in Cuba, Boriquén and Hispaniola.

Research on young Haitian immigrants and refugees has tended to look outward, at substance use, sexual risk and delinquency, leaving depression and anxiety largely unexamined. Fawzi and colleagues set out to correct that imbalance by measuring inward distress and the conditions that accompany it.

A stratified random sample was drawn from Haitian students in Boston's public high schools; 84 percent agreed to a standardised interview, and diagnoses were assigned by best-estimate methods. Depression appeared in 14.0 percent of participants and PTSD in 11.6 percent, with 7.9 percent carrying both.

Regression analysis tied depression to a father's death, schoolwork going badly and time spent away from friends, and PTSD to physical abuse, frequent arguments with parents, and fear about personal safety and the neighbourhood. Because several of these pressures arise only after arrival, the authors argue that support programmes and school-based mental health services should be built around them.

Haitian and foreign accounts alike have credited Boisrond-Tonnerre with writing the 1804 act of independence, drafting it through a single night at Dessalines's order. Jenson doubts the story on textual and practical grounds and restores Dessalines to the center of it.

No signed original survives, and the machinery Madiou describes, simultaneous publication across the new state on New Year's Day, did not exist; no Haitian newspaper is confirmed to have been printing in early 1804. What is now read as one document was more likely several texts composed over the first weeks of the year, later gathered and backdated to give independence a founding moment.

The earlier proclamation Dessalines issued in November 1803 with Christophe and Clervaux circulated widely in the United States, where it was taken for a declaration. Across these texts Jenson finds a consistent ferocity of image and address that she identifies as his own.

Spain, during its long rule in Latin America, cast itself as the compulsory go-between for the rest of Europe. From the sixteenth century into the nineteenth, whatever travelled the route linking Europe to Spanish America — merchandise, news, ideas — was supposed to move through the crown, or so Spain maintained.

That arrangement did not survive the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Napoleon's invasion left the Spanish monarchy badly weakened, and the wars of independence followed directly from that loss of authority. The countries that emerged from Spanish rule then built their own connections with Europe, setting the terms themselves and making plain which European nations they preferred.

Buss and Gardner ask why decades of assistance have left Haiti no better off. Their account runs from Aristide's election in 1990 through the coup that followed, the embargo, the American intervention of 1994, his second presidency and its violent end in 2004, to Preval's return and the billions pledged after it.

Aid, on their telling, was repeatedly suspended, reduced, redirected and restored as leverage over Haitian politics, and the effect was to feed instability rather than to relieve it. Donors rank the country among the hardest cases anywhere, beside Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe, but the authors insist it is an extreme instance rather than a unique one.

They set the failure against a longer record: nine of fifty-four elected presidents finishing a term, upwards of a hundred revolts and coups, and repeated American landings. Neither Haitian governance nor donor practice, they conclude, can be repaired on its own.

Girard examines what white, black and mulatto women did during the final two years of the war that ended French rule, 1802 to 1804. The assumption that wartime narrowed women's part in events does not survive the evidence.

Desirable women served as tokens of a man's standing in colonial society, and some traded on that position to extract political favors. Women of color contributed through logistics, espionage and at times combat; those convicted of assisting the rebel army were put to death for it.

White women occupied a different place. Because they were taken to be essential to the colonial order itself, the forces under Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines made them targets alongside other civilians, and after the rebel victory the surviving white population was killed.

In 1934 Haiti marked one hundred and thirty years as an independent republic. Smith takes that same year as the occasion of a second kind of Haitian independence, though the description available here breaks off before naming it.

Poor households do not chiefly need small sums, Rutherford argues; they need occasional large ones. Life-cycle obligations, emergencies from illness and bereavement to fire, flood or the bulldozing of a slum, and opportunities ranging from a business to a better roof or a bribe for a secure job all demand more cash than a home can hold.

Since the poor own little to sell or pawn, the dependable route to a lump sum is to build it out of savings. Rutherford calls this basic personal financial intermediation and reduces it to three moves: saving up, borrowing against savings not yet made, and combinations of the two. The rest of the book follows from that.

He then surveys what people have devised without banks, from rotating and accumulating savings clubs to deposit collectors paid handsomely to take money away and keep it safe, and describes SafeSave, designed around tiny, irregular, daily transactions.

By 1797 Toussaint Louverture had forced out the French agent Hédouville, negotiated the British withdrawal on his own authority, imposed his own agrarian policy and begun restoring the colony's commerce. Thomas asks why, at that moment, he did not declare independence — a step that would have gratified his supporters and strengthened his hand against Rigaud.

The answer offered is strategic rather than sentimental. Toussaint was operating among predatory powers: a Directory determined to keep its most valuable possession, and a Britain and a United States that read a black liberator as a threat to their commerce and their own slave systems. Nominal dependence on France, on this reading, was what bought the concessions and protection he extracted from London and Washington, and the time needed to lay foundations for a state. The calculation held, Thomas concludes, until Napoleon, whom it had not allowed for.

American newspapers describe Haiti as failed, and as the poorest country in the hemisphere, laying its troubles at its own door while saying little of the outside forces that helped produce them. Potter tests that pattern empirically.

The approach is critical geopolitics, applied to a single year of coverage: everything five leading U.S. papers ran in 2004, examined for the vocabulary applied to the country and for the frames that vocabulary builds up.

Behind the method sits a line of criticism showing that how a place is represented can settle what counts as common sense about it, and can make social inequality look warranted. Potter's stated hope is that naming these images opens the way to rethinking how Haiti is popularly seen, and to a different conversation about it, one large enough to hold the whole country's story. Only then, the argument goes, can its problems be addressed.