Delivered at a conference honouring Rex Nettleford, this lecture returns to a question Best first put in 1967 and asks what three decades of formal independence have done to it. Nettleford stands as his figure of Caribbean "betweenity", obliged to inherit a landscape through borrowed institutions and another people's language.

Best is unsparing about the region's validating elites, himself among them, and about a university that answered each failure of its social sciences by adding a department, then a faculty, then an institute, without confronting the question underneath: how a people comes to know itself, for its own purposes, with the resources it has.

He turns to upheavals in physics and mathematics, where instability and uncertainty have displaced the old order of closed and self-regulating systems, to argue that no tradition can claim the right to rule on the strength of scientific triumph. The conclusion puts the creative arts, not economics, at the centre of independent thought.

How did a state whose people were overwhelmingly African and Afro-Caribbean end up carrying an Amerindian word? Geggus notes that nobody recorded how the decision was reached, and works backward from what it ruled out.

An African name was never plausible. The enslaved spoke dozens of languages and no single homeland could have satisfied them all, while the officers who signed the declaration of 1804 were mostly colony-born and largely of mixed descent. Taino symbolism gave the new state an anchor outside both Europe and Africa, and suited a literate ex-free-colored group that now filled the administration.

Geggus is skeptical of the companion claim that Arawak language or ritual survived to be picked up in 1804. The island's native population had all but vanished by the 1550s, Boya was not a Taino remnant, and the chant long cited as Arawak turns out to be African. What he grants the name is staying power: it outlasted partition, monarchy and republic alike.

Michel approaches Vodou as an educational system rather than an exotic survival, asking how its view of the world is handed from one generation to the next in a country where nearly everyone believes in the spirits while most profess Catholicism in public.

Vodou offers no scripture and no fixed code, she argues; adepts work out moral principles from the wisdom of elders, the lessons of a life, and their dealings with the lwa. The spirits teach by mirroring the whole range of human conduct, contradictions included, rather than by precept, which is why outsiders have wrongly concluded the religion has no morality. Children learn by imitation, young people through graded participation and responsibility, initiates through long apprenticeship. Competence is judged by style and by konesans, a knowledge that is both the means and the end of the training.

No settlement in Haiti, Michel concludes, will hold while the elite and foreign actors refuse this culture their respect.

Kadish takes up four French women — Germaine de Staël, Olympe de Gouges, Claire de Duras, and Sophie Doin — who wrote between 1790 and 1825 about the uprisings of 1791 in Haiti. Rather than treating rebel violence as inexplicable, each set it against the violence of slavery itself.

The pairing of terror with blackness in the article's title echoes C. L. R. James, whose The Black Jacobins appeared in 1938, and that echo frames how these writers handled their subject.

Reading their responses closely yields three things at once, Kadish argues: a clearer picture of antislavery sentiment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, evidence of women's part in the political and cultural thought of the period, and a link between the abolitionist cause and women's emergence as writers with a voice of their own.

Rural Haiti is usually taken as the least likely place on earth for voluntary cooperation to work, which is precisely why White and Runge choose it. They recast the upkeep of a small watershed as a problem of public goods, where a landholder's contribution of labor amounts to a conditional promise to cooperate rather than defect, then test statistically which farmers actually turned out.

The results unsettle a familiar assumption. Insecure land tenure made no difference to participation, and neither wealth nor poverty predicted much; check dams went up on defectors' land as readily as on cooperators', and roughly a third of the labor came from people holding no land in the watershed at all. What did predict cooperation was prior membership in a groupman and the habit of exchanging labor, reciprocity-based institutions already in place. Jointly held ravines, effectively open access, were the one arrangement local assurance could not overcome.

Rival pictures of kreyòl, and what was at stake in fixing its spelling. Schieffelin and Doucet treat the standardization of an orthography as a symbolic decision rather than a technical one.

Educated Haitians describe the language as something they hold in common with everyone else in the country, and it has long served as a durable marker of Haitian identity. Its image, though, is fought over in several arenas at once, and the terms speakers use to label varieties of spoken kreyòl carry ideological weight of their own.

Tying those metalinguistic labels to the spelling disputes, the authors read the whole argument as nationalist discourse about Haitianness — about what counts as authentic and legitimate, and therefore about the part language plays in forming a national identity.

Scholars have long tied the rise of Saint-Domingue's wealthy free people of color to the coffee boom that began in the late 1760s. Garrigus tests that chronology in the southern parish of Aquin, working from notarial records, estate inventories and colonial censuses, and finds that the fortunes of families such as the Raimonds, Ploys and Depas-Medinas rested instead on indigo, on three generations of accumulated technical skill, and on a brisk contraband trade that their distance from official ports made possible.

Prosperity of this kind, he argues, began early in the eighteenth century and was merely accelerated after 1760. What changed abruptly was race. Men addressed as Sieur in official papers, their ancestry unremarked, were by the 1780s labelled by colour in the same documents, and apparent surges in the free colored population may register a hardening of that line rather than actual growth. Planters losing civic standing as they gained wealth pressed their claim to citizenship after 1789.

In conversation, Fouchard lays out the version of Haitian history he spent a career defending. He starts before Columbus, with Ciboney and Arawak settlement, and refuses the word discovery: an island of a million people was already inhabited, and what followed was extermination in the search for gold.

Marronnage is his organizing idea. Flight began with the first African arrivals in 1503 and never stopped, carrying with it poisoning, sabotage, arson and abortion, and keeping a habit of resistance alive two centuries before the Encyclopedists wrote a line. When the indigenous army was close to collapse before Leclerc, he argues, it was maroon commanders who kept fighting and showed the regular officers how the war could be won.

He also claims Toussaint for American history, on the grounds that his refusal to serve Napoleon's designs forced the sale of Louisiana, and ends on colonial theater and the singer Minette.

Two claims recur in writing about the rising of August 1791 in Saint-Domingue's northern plain: that it grew out of marronage, and that vodou furnished its organization and inspiration. Geggus tests both against the documentary record and finds neither well supported.

Colonists went on distinguishing runaways from insurgents, and no maroon band is known to have joined the revolt. Boukman and Jean-François had each been fugitives, but neither led a maroon community, and the leaders appear to have been living on their plantations when it began, which suggests the rising was organized from inside the system rather than outside it. Marronage, he proposes, worked more as a safety valve.

On religion he is equally cautious, noting that the chant tied to Bois Caïman has been mistranslated as an oath to kill whites when it in fact calls on a Kongo divinity for protection. That such cults gave rebellions leaders and cohesion he grants; that they caused this one is unproven.

Perched three thousand feet above the northern plain, the La Ferrière Citadel is presented here as the crowning work — and the great cost — of Henry Christophe's kingdom. Wilson recounts how Christophe refused the presidency in 1806, secured full powers in the north, and crowned himself in 1811, then built a state around a civil code and a rural one, compulsory labor, courts, schools, a printing house, and a currency backed by gold.

The fortress itself is described from the inside: galleries, magazines, cisterns, and barracks meant to hold a garrison through a three-year siege, with cannon captured from the French still trained on the valley. How thousands of conscripted men hauled guns and half a million tons of stone up those paths no surviving record explains; twenty thousand are said to have died doing it. Paralyzed by a stroke and abandoned, Christophe shot himself in 1820 and was buried in the courtyard.

Bulfinch Lambe worked for the Royal African Company at its factory in Jakin, the port of Allada, until the king of Allada seized him in 1722 as security against an unpaid debt. When Agaja of Dahomey conquered Allada in 1724, Lambe passed into his hands and was carried inland to Abomey.

Agaja soon formed the idea, perhaps at Lambe's prompting, of negotiating a commercial agreement with the Company. Writing that November to Jeremiah Tinker, who governed the Company's factory in neighboring Whydah, Lambe reported the king's interest in establishing a correspondence and in having Europeans come to him, and offered himself as intermediary, which doubled as a route out of captivity. His release in 1726 came with the expectation that he would come back: Agaja told the trader William Snelgrave the following year that Lambe had sworn to return with a ship.

Law builds on Marion Johnson's earlier account of the episode in this journal.

Names that colonizers attach to colonized people are never simply descriptive. Trouillot treats such labels as the product of several forces working at once: the everyday social relations of a given colony, the assumptions colonists carried with them, rivalries between empires, and pressures arriving from the metropole.

The case examined here is Dominica, where British colonists took roughly a century, from 1838 to 1928, to settle on calling the island's cultivators peasants. Trouillot follows that slow shift in vocabulary and shows that the term carried the same weight for both sides of the quarrel over it. Those who welcomed the label and those who resisted it agreed on what it signified: an admission that production on the island had changed, and that cultivators had won firmer command over how their own work was organized.

Economic models tend to assume a government that wants development and simply needs the right technical advice. Lundahl argues that Haiti disproves the assumption. Population growth on eroding hillsides and stagnant farming technique explain part of the poverty, but the decisive factor is a state whose rulers have treated the country as something to be extracted from.

Reading the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 and the disorder that followed, he finds continuity rather than rupture: predation reproduced itself because rent-taking through the state machinery had become the point of politics, and because parties grounded in social interests had never been permitted to form. Borrowing terms from Tullock and Leijonhufvud, he casts autocracy as a stable global equilibrium and democracy as a narrow corridor Haiti has never occupied. Removing a particular dictator, on this account, leaves the equilibrium intact; only much larger shocks would dislodge it.

Who was actually carried across the Atlantic—at what age, and whether male or female—is for Geggus a question with consequences on both shores, bearing on the societies captives left and those they entered. He pursues it through the French trade, using two bodies of evidence.

The first covers some 177,000 captives shipped between 1714 and 1792, counted from the ship-by-ship inventory of French slaving voyages that Jean Mettas and Serge Daget assembled as the Répertoire des expéditions négrières. The second draws on close to 400 estate inventories listing over 13,300 African-born people on Saint Domingue plantations between 1721 and 1797.

Measured against what was already known, the figures show how sharply the mix shifted over the century and from one point of embarkation or arrival to the next, and point to the market pressures deciding how many men, women and children were sold. Consistent contrasts emerge among African ethnic groups and among buying colonies, several previously unremarked.

Law returns to a subject he treated in the same journal in 1977, extending and correcting that earlier account of how slaves reached the Atlantic trade from Dahomey.

Two questions organize it: how much came from local raiding rather than purchase from the interior, and how a group of private merchants emerged. Dahomey's kings first ran the trade as a royal monopoly fed entirely by raiding. From the middle of the eighteenth century the kingdom took up a middleman role, buying from the interior, and because the kings generally left that side alone a private sector formed.

Merchants began as state officials licensed to trade for the king or for chiefs, then won the right to do business for themselves as well. The shift from slaves to palm oil in the nineteenth century made them wealthier and more autonomous, and sharpened recurring conflicts with the monarchy over commercial policy and its seizures, divisions that weakened Dahomey against European imperialism.

Dahomey's conquest of Whydah under King Agaja in March 1727 was unquestionably a major event. Dahomian tradition remembered it, with some simplification, as the moment the kingdom entered the Atlantic slave trade and as the high point of his reign, recalled in his surname Hunyito, taker of ships, and in the ship he took as an emblem.

Europeans on the scene were struck by it too, one eyewitness calling it a great revolution. Part of the impression came from the scale of destruction, described at the time as desolation by sword, fire, and famine visited on a country that had lately been populous and prosperous. The outcome had also been unforeseen: Bulfinch Lamb, an English trader held captive in Dahomey, had warned Agaja against attacking, arguing that Whydah's numbers and its imported European firearms made success unlikely.

Law introduces a neglected French account of the war, the Relation de la guerre de Juda by the Sieur Ringard of Nantes.

Dahomey is unusually well documented, and Law sets out both its chronology and the materials historians work from. Probably founded in the seventeenth century, the Fon kingdom became a regional power under Agaja, whose conquests of Allada in 1724 and Whydah in 1727 brought it into direct dealings with European slave traders. It stayed dominant until the French conquest of 1892–94, and the monarchy ended when the last king was deposed in 1900; ritual at the Abomey palace, now a museum, kept some institutional thread alive.

Two bodies of evidence anchor the record. European writing from the 1720s onward is unusually full, including a history Archibald Dalzel printed in 1793. Beside it sits a rich oral tradition, known best through the recension Le Herissé published in 1911 — which, Law notes, translates and partly abridges testimony from one informant: Agbidinukun, who administered a district under French rule and was brother to Behanzin, the kingdom's last independent ruler.

Lachance takes the ten thousand Saint-Domingue refugees expelled from Cuba who reached New Orleans in 1809, a number close to the city's whole population, as a case for testing what receiving societies predict about newcomers against what actually follows.

The arrivals divided roughly evenly among whites, free people of color and the enslaved, and drew the mixed response refugees usually draw: humanitarian argument on one side, fear of alien ideas and of insurrection on the other. Anglo-Americans warned above all that the influx would fasten a French character on the territory for good.

That prediction proved half right. French speakers did remain a majority of the white population for about two decades, and the refugees reinforced the community in numbers and institutions, but the ratio was already so lopsided that preponderance would have lasted anyway. Little further migration followed, so attrition set in; by the 1830s spouses of refugee origin had dwindled while arrivals from France rose sharply.