The kingdom of Dahomey rose as slaving in its region grew, and the overlap has made it a standard case study of what the traffic did to African societies. Law reviews how historians have handled that story, trying to establish how the Dahomian state and its own slaving were actually connected.

One long-running view holds that Dahomey's rulers originally meant to bring the traffic to an end. Law considers that claim and refutes it. He turns instead to the kingdom's militaristic character, which is best understood, he suggests, as a consequence of warfare intensified by overseas demand for prisoners of war.

A third interpretation reads Dahomey's political centralization as a constructive answer to the disorder that raiding for captives brought with it. Law examines that position too, and endorses part of it.

Written in the months after Jean-Claude Duvalier's flight, when new parties and newspapers were appearing daily, Nicholls's account explains the dynasty's collapse as the result of its support shifting from one class to another.

Francois Duvalier won in 1957 as the candidate of the black middle class against a bourgeois rival favoured by the church and the American embassy, then held power by terror, populist rhetoric and the careful distribution of thin patronage, cultivating houngans and militia chiefs while dismantling every rival centre of authority. His son inherited the machine without the father's knowledge of the country. Encouraged by Washington, Jean-Claude staked the regime on modernization and assembly plants, leaned steadily on the business community, and lost the black Duvalierists; the Bennett family's plundering then alienated the bourgeoisie too.

That left him exposed to mass protest, to the church, and finally to the embassy and the army. Nicholls closes by surveying the parties, unions and clergy contending in the interim.

American newspapers greeted the 1915 landing in Haiti as a patient neighbour finally doing a necessary job. Pamphile shows how the NAACP set about dismantling that picture.

James Weldon Johnson, who had widened the association's agenda to include the treatment of black people abroad, went to Haiti and came back with three findings: that Washington had twice tried before 1915 to force a financial convention on Haiti and used the killing of President Sam as its opening; that Roger Farnham of the National City Bank stood behind the policy through his control of the Banque Nationale; and that the campaign against Charlemagne Peralte's insurgents had killed some three thousand Haitians against thirteen Marines.

The report reached the front pages and became an election issue once Harding could use Roosevelt's boast about writing Haiti's constitution against the Democrats. The occupation continued regardless, and the association went on agitating until the Marines withdrew in 1934.

In 1904 an obscure Arctic explorer and Geological Survey clerk named Robert Stein wrote privately to the novelist Thomas Nelson Page with a plan to empty the United States of its black population. Smith reconstructs the scheme from that unpublished letter, which is why it has been missing from accounts of colonization as a strain in American racial thought.

Stein proposed persuading Britain to rename Nigeria Hopeland and open it to nine million emigrants, installing a Tuskegee graduate as a costumed emperor while real authority stayed with British officials, and holding out polygamy as an inducement. Property and labor would be made illegal for blacks at home so that flight would look voluntary; the South, cleaned out, would prosper.

Page let the proposal drop. Smith reads it as an extreme instance of an ordinary fear, and of a habit of fashioning orderly, unworkable solutions to problems its author found intractable.

Stein sets out to fix the record on a sequence of events that historians have handled badly: the ending of slavery in French Saint Domingue during the second half of 1793, which made the colony the first place in the New World to outlaw bondage and grant full rights regardless of color.

The confusion, as Stein describes it, runs across several fields at once. Historians of the French Revolution have mostly passed over abolition as a sideshow to events in France; writers on the Caribbean have circulated versions that are wrong or partial; and even Haiti specialists have blurred together the separate proclamations issued between 21 June and 31 October.

Against that muddle the article lays out an accurate chronology and assigns responsibility. Stein credits the outcome chiefly to Léger Félicité Sonthonax, with Etienne Polverel following along, though not always willingly.

Plummer places Haiti's poverty and economic dependence alongside that of other Caribbean nations, but treats the Haitian case as the pattern from which the others can be read. Independence in 1804 did not settle the country's position; it opened a long and worsening contest for survival among imperialist states.

What happened in Haiti, on this account, anticipated what would later happen across Latin America, and shows how national ambitions in the hemisphere were turned aside. Plummer draws particular attention to the mechanism: decline here was driven by commerce rather than by plantation enterprise or large capital investment, which makes Haiti a clear illustration of that route into underdevelopment.

One thing survived every upheaval in Saint-Domingue, Stein contends: the conviction among those in charge that the colony must keep producing. White governors in 1789 and black commanders in 1803 agreed on almost nothing else, yet each treated a functioning plantation economy as the precondition of whatever they hoped to build.

The labourers did not share that view, and after emancipation in late 1793 they were free to say so. What the leadership called order the cultivators experienced as the discipline they had just escaped, and the two understandings of the plantation could not be reconciled by decree, incentive or force. Stein follows successive attempts to square them and reads each failure as evidence that no settlement was available. Only when Pétion and Boyer allowed the estates to be broken up, in the years after independence, did most Haitians get what they had actually wanted.

Law explains the emergence of Lagos as the leading port of the Slave Coast by looking at where two commercial systems met: European shipping on the Atlantic and the canoe traffic moving goods through the coastal lagoons.

Sixteenth-century Europeans used the Lagos channel to reach Ijebu, buying slaves and cloth there, then abandoned the route in the following century. Lagos itself began as a fishing hamlet before Benin garrisoned it around 1600, perhaps to shut Europeans out of Ijebu and keep that trade for itself. Formal subjection to Benin lasted into the nineteenth century, but Benin's weakening during the eighteenth left the town independent in practice.

Law doubts the assumption that the lagoon route running west to Allada and Whydah predates European contact, treating it instead as a product of European interest drifting westward from Benin. Lagos exported slaves and Ijebu cloth from the 1760s; it became a major port only when Dahomey's military pressure pushed shipments eastward.

Geggus opens from a mismatch: the revolt that wrecked France's wealthiest colony and produced Haiti — the only slave uprising in world history to succeed — has generated an enormous literature but very little foundational research.

Much of what exists, he observes, is popular or polemical writing drawn to the spectacle of Saint Domingue's collapse and to Toussaint Louverture's career. At the level of primary sources, by contrast, the field has advanced hardly at all since the Études Ardouin published in 1853 and Pauléus Sannon's Histoire from the 1920s. Geggus's own contribution is to point toward primary material that has gone unused.

The Code Noir of 1685 opened by ordering all Jews out of France's colonies, which makes their presence in Saint-Domingue a puzzle. Loker's answer is that the law went unenforced as often as not, that bribes and loopholes worked, and that many arrivals presented themselves at first as New Christians.

Sifting notarial acts, indemnity registers, parish records and family letters, he maps names across the colony: around Jeremie and the district named for a rabbi called Moron, at Les Cayes, in Leogane and Port-au-Prince, in Jacmel. Most had come from the Sephardic towns of southwestern France or from Curacao and the smaller Antilles.

His answer to his own title is narrow. Only at Cap Francais does the evidence support an organized community, with a prayer leader, a burial ground, and a fundraising letter from Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel addressed to its members. Elsewhere he finds scattered families whose religious life, if any, went unrecorded.

Working from the 1977 Haitian Fertility Survey, Allman sets out what was then known about childbearing in a country where three-quarters of the population farmed and income per head sat below US$270. Fertility proved moderate rather than high, with a marked gap between town and countryside, though he cautions that one survey cannot establish a trend and that the 1982 census would be needed to confirm any movement.

Explaining the level means attending to what demography usually handles badly here: legal marriage is uncommon, unions take varied and sometimes polygamous forms, breastfeeding is long but shortening fastest among young urban mothers, and heavy male emigration removes many women from exposure to pregnancy. About a quarter of exposed women used contraception, mostly traditional methods, and many who had never used any said they meant to. Allman expects rapid uptake if modern methods reach rural areas, whatever the economy does.

Known as susu, box or partner depending on the island, rotating credit associations travelled with West Indian migrants and went on working in Brooklyn. The study traces them from the post-emancipation Caribbean, where black households pooled savings for burials, weddings, school fees and small shops while later-arriving groups came to dominate commerce, to New York, where members' occupations vary and nurses are conspicuous.

The organization is deliberately informal: no constitution, no advertising beyond word of mouth, no receipts. An organizer fixes the size of the hand and the interval, recruits people known to earn steadily, and friendship stands in for collateral. Interviews with ten organizers and a questionnaire returned by users and non-users support the reading of these bodies as structural shields — adaptive devices for first-generation immigrants shut out of ordinary credit, expected to matter less to their children, and used elsewhere for house deposits and business capital.

Trouillot begins from a fact he thinks has been passed over: between 1767 and 1789 coffee exports from Saint-Domingue quadrupled in volume and rose almost sixfold in value, approaching the returns from sugar. The familiar picture of a sugar colony converted into a coffee-growing nation by wartime destruction therefore needs revising, since the shift was well advanced before 1791.

The boom is read at two scales at once. Set inside the world-economy, it shows a crop pulled into territory under direct European control as European consumption grew. Set on the ground, it produced a rural population of small planters, many of them gens de couleur, many of them whites outside the plantocracy with no metropolitan alliances, whose rise the sugar planters answered with ethnic entries in parish records and tightening restrictions.

The argument is also methodological. World-system analysis and close local study each fail alone, and the coffee estate is where the two levels meet.

Black Americans paid little attention when the Marines landed in Haiti in 1915. Booker T. Washington thought Haitians backward and short of industrial schooling, and most eyes were on the war in Europe. Plummer traces how that indifference hardened into sustained opposition.

Race leaders moved first, but ordinary people followed, writing to the State Department, the black press and the White House, pressing their weight as Republican voters, and demanding a hand in policy toward Haiti. Administrations answered differently: Harding campaigned on the issue and then investigated, Coolidge ignored the critics, Hoover conceded a second black commission and then managed it as Harding had. Robert Moton's delegation was refused passage on navy ships.

The episode matters, Plummer argues, because it registers a shift in how black Americans understood themselves and their kinship with people of African descent elsewhere. Accommodation was given up in Haiti as it was being given up at home.

Most of the merchants Haitians called Syrians were Lebanese Christians who had left the Ottoman Empire around the turn of the century. Plummer follows them into the middle of a contest between the great powers over the Haitian market.

American diplomats wanted influence but had no business community on the ground; they found their instrument in these traders, who soon ordered directly from New York and Chicago and carried cheap American goods to peasant buyers. Their success displaced Haitian merchants and eroded the commercial base of the elite, which pressed successive governments to expel them or bar foreigners from retail trade.

Every such attempt failed. Washington intervened on the traders' behalf, prodded by textile manufacturers and merchants' associations, and the ambiguity of Syrian nationality kept the question alive past the end of the occupation. Plummer's point is that a small and harassed minority was blamed for a drama other people had written.

Black volunteers from Saint-Domingue fought at the siege of Savannah in 1779, a fact Clark finds slighted by white American historians and inflated by those who set out to correct them.

Working through French journals, troop returns and officers' papers, he counts roughly seven hundred grenadiers and chasseurs from the colony, assigned to trench work and a feigned attack, and reshuffled into unfamiliar companies by de Fontanges on the eve of the assault. That reorganization, he suggests, is why their movements cannot now be traced in any detail.

The gap has left room for legend. Clark is sceptical of the familiar roll of future Haitian leaders said to have served there, and of the claim that a black legion saved the American army from annihilation; sources for these assertions are seldom given. He argues the men are owed an accurate account rather than a heroic one, and that black pride stands to gain from the exchange.

Between the rising of 1791 and Christophe's death in 1820, the richest plantation colony in the Americas became a country of small proprietors. Lacerte treats that as the central economic fact of the period and asks how successive governments, French and Haitian alike, tried and failed to prevent it.

Every regime wanted the estates kept whole and worked. Coercion produced desertion and falling revenue instead, and the southern republic ran deficits from 1808 to 1812. Petion raised the cultivator's share of the crop to a half, alarming an elite whose position rested on the old arrangement, and after dissolving the Senate in 1809 he began handing out land outright, first to veterans according to rank, later more widely, sometimes in place of unpaid salaries.

The figures are poor, one nineteenth-century estimate putting it at seventy-six thousand carreaux among some two thousand recipients, but the result is clear: two decades of quiet, and a subsistence economy leaning on a single export.

When the British leased out the estates of absentee planters in the districts they still held in 1796, they generated something historians of Saint-Domingue rarely have: 197 plantation inventories compiled on a common model within a single six-month window. Geggus uses them to describe a slave society at one moment, across roughly fifteen thousand people.

The tabulations cut in several directions. Ethnic origins varied sharply by region and by crop, which complicates any single estimate of the colony's African composition, and the traces of contraband imports suggest that common figures for illicit slave trading are too high. Sugar and coffee estates differed in structure, and the population looks more creolized and more evenly balanced by sex than had been supposed. What the columns show most starkly is physical ruin: nearly two-fifths under sixteen or over sixty, a tenth recorded as of no value, one adult man in six sick, disabled or dying.

Fieldwork carried out in 1972 in a rural section of the commune of Verrettes, in the Artibonite Valley, anchors Lahav's comparison of two offices available to Haitian peasants who need a quarrel settled: the chef de section, who runs a rural section on the government's behalf, and the justice of the peace, bottom rung of the national court system.

Both were built after independence and have run side by side ever since, one resting on local custom and military authority, the other on the French-derived code the young republic adopted. Lahav argues that the balance between them is tipping. Roads, wage employment, schooling and a foreign-run hospital have produced an educated and relatively prosperous stratum that treats the justice of the peace as the only legitimate forum, and the weightier cases now go there.

She reads this as social differentiation rather than government policy pulling peasants into the national legal system.

In the last years before the French Revolution, Nantes looked like a boomtown. Arthur Young, passing through in 1788, took its fresh construction as a sign of prosperity that never lies. French slaving had been run out of the port for close to a century, and by 1789 its merchants were committing something near 10 million livres each year to the traffic.

Stein argues the appearance misleads. Behind the busy port most traders found the business hard going, squeezed by conditions in France, in the colonies, and on the African coast. A few did assemble enormous fortunes almost at once, and that possibility kept drawing capital in.

Measured soberly, returns across the old regime's last ten years ran about level with what an investor could expect from land or from buying an office. What set slaving apart was not its ordinary yield but its long odds on sudden, immense gain.

Nineteenth-century Haitian politics was fought partly through rival accounts of the national past, and Nicholls traces how writers close to the mulatto elite built, in the two decades after 1847, a version of history designed to justify their claim to leadership. The black counter-legend provoked in reply would later be taken up by Price-Mars and the Griots and feed the rise of Duvalier.

Thomas Madiou's history, published from 1847, is the pivot. Though a mulatto himself, Madiou kept clear of the elite cliques, served under Soulouque, printed appendices recording the colour of everyone he named, and judged Dessalines and Christophe more generously than his peers thought decent. Beaubrun Ardouin and Joseph Saint-Remy wrote largely against him, and with Emile Nau, Celigny Ardouin and others set out an authorized version centred on Petion.

Nicholls likens this frankly practical use of the past to whig history, and to its political uses in the Soviet Union and in Africa.

Laguerre treats Vodou less as a fixed body of belief than as an institution that keeps changing the social unit it binds. Under slavery, missionaries failed to reach the plantations, and ceremonies performed in huts and at clandestine gatherings drew separate ethnic cults into a single syncretic practice; among maroons it took its most organized form and supplied both a rallying point and a training ground for leaders of the independence struggle.

After 1804 it lost official standing but not adherents. Tied to the lakou, with its extended families and undivided land, it served as a family cult; as the lakou broke up into nuclear households and fragmented plots, it became the religion of the village — unofficial, sporadically harassed, tolerated in practice. Persecution came with the Concordat and the campaigns of the occupation years, while Duvalier reversed course, naming himself the nation's spiritual chief and routing ceremonies through the Tontons Macoutes.

MacLeod sets out to unsettle the received portrait of Faustin Soulouque as a dull-witted tyrant whose twelve years in power were an embarrassing interruption in Haitian life. That portrait comes largely from French and American writers, and it leaves obvious puzzles unanswered: how a supposed nonentity outmanoeuvred the senators who elected him in 1847 expecting a figurehead, and why he lasted so long when abler presidents fell within months.

Reading consular dispatches, the government press and nineteenth-century Haitian historians, MacLeod finds a shrewd politician rather than a caricature. Soulouque struck at black extremists as readily as at the Port-au-Prince elite, promoted mulatto talent, and treated his imperial nobility as a cheap way of binding generals, merchants, piquet chiefs and Vodoun leaders to the regime. His campaigns against the Dominican Republic followed convictions his predecessors had shared.

The essay is offered as a prompt to rethink Haiti's recurring strongmen, not as a settled account of them.

For years Haiti was the one French island set among Spanish possessions, and the first republic in Latin America to win its independence: on 1 January 1804, after the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture.

Twelve years later Simón Bolívar, who had given himself over to the mainland independence war, sailed there to ask for help. In Haiti he met Francisco Xavier Mina, one of the more dynamic figures in Hispanic history and a guerrilla fighter by trade.

Lewis reconstructs that meeting and the events around it, an episode he describes as having remained obscure until now.

Munro served in the State Department's Latin American division and then as United States minister in Port-au-Prince from 1930 to 1932, and he recounts the unwinding of the American protectorate largely from inside the legation.

Washington had wanted out since the end of the Wilson years but found ending an intervention harder than beginning one: bondholders had been promised that American officials would keep collecting customs, and nobody wished to leave a government behind that could not hold the country together. By 1929 elite resentment, new excise taxes falling on the peasantry and Borno's refusal to allow elections converged in a student strike and street demonstrations violent enough to bring the marines out again, and Hoover asked Congress for an investigating commission.

Munro follows the negotiations from there to the Haitianization of the Garde and the marines' departure in 1934, with financial control surviving under a fiscal representative into the 1940s. Poverty and illiteracy, he concludes, were left untouched.

Best proposes a typology of economic systems as an alternative to theory built on North Atlantic experience. Caribbean economies belong to a class he calls hinterland economy: externally propelled, with the decisive choices made in a metropolis. Five standing conventions govern the relationship, covering exclusive spheres of influence, a division of labour confining the hinterland to raw output and rough processing, a currency backed by metropolitan reserves, metropolitan control of shipping, and preferential access to metropolitan markets.

Within that class he separates conquest hinterlands, settlement hinterlands, and a third kind given over to exploitation. The first organizes people for tribute. The second, worked by family farms on land free for the clearing, becomes a new metropolis in miniature, egalitarian and largely self-supplying. The third is where plantation economy belongs: labour imported for export production onto land that would otherwise permit subsistence, which requires institutions total enough to enclose a worker's whole existence. Plantation and chattel slavery together supply that framework.

Ardener sets out to make comparison possible across institutions that anthropologists had described piecemeal under names such as esusu and contribution club. Geertz's definition is too narrow, she argues: contributions are not always fixed, the entire fund is not always handed over, and payment is not always in cash. What is essential is regularity and rotation, a standing group of contributors paying in at set intervals into a fund that passes, entire or partly, to each of them by turns.

A survey of the literature follows, from nineteenth-century China through Japan, India, Africa and the Caribbean, with attention to how the fund is allocated: by lot, by dice, by auctioning a discount, by written tender.

She keeps returning to the point that members do not benefit equally. The first recipient owes the rest until the cycle closes; the last is owed throughout. A tentative field guide for future study closes the paper.

By 1928 American rule in Haiti amounted, in Cooper's reckoning, to a joint dictatorship weighted heavily toward Washington. High Commissioner John H. Russell held effective power, President Louis Borno legislated with his consent through a hand-picked Council of State, and the legislature closed by the Marines in 1918 had not met since. Educated Haitians shut out of office attacked it in the press, their only remaining outlet.

The unravelling began with a student strike at the Damien agricultural school in late 1929, which spread into wider protest and ended in bloodshed at Les Cayes. Hoover sent the Forbes Commission, negotiations followed, Stenio Vincent took the presidency, and the last Marines sailed in 1934.

Cooper canvasses the reasons for leaving: defence needs that no longer required the island, finances judged repaired, deeper change conceded unattainable, isolationist opinion at home, and Haitian insistence. His own judgment is that the occupation left little behind and cost the United States standing across Latin America.

Mintz describes the hedges of living plants that mark boundaries on the Fond-des-Negres plateau, a coffee, sisal and vetiver district of Haiti's southern peninsula where production is carried on in small peasant holdings and houses stand in yards, or lakou, set apart from the fields.

Only a handful of species are used, each chosen for known qualities. Bromelia pinguin turns back any animal and holds earth on paths worn below the level of the land, but it harbours snakes and rats. The cactus-like Euphorbia lactea tolerates dry ground and grows in orderly lines. The quick-growing parese makes the best barrier of all, though goats and horses will strip its leaves. Croton and Pedilanthus are mostly ornamental; sisal and vetiver matter more for rope, thatch and essential oil than for fencing.

Erosion on the slopes is severe, yet terracing and contour planting are unknown. Mintz suggests extending a familiar practice rather than importing a new one.

Nineteenth-century historians handed down a damning sequence: Dessalines betrayed Charles Belair, Toussaint Louverture's nephew, to the French, and was rewarded six weeks later with command of the revolutionary army. De Young finds this implausible. Officers such as Petion, Christophe and Clervaux, and thousands of guerrilla fighters, would hardly have submitted to a man who had just delivered Belair to Leclerc.

Working from the Rochambeau papers, he prints the report of Commandant Repussard, who actually made the capture. It shows Belair taken by a National Guard detachment sent from the far bank on Jablonowski's orders, found with surprising ease, and it shows Repussard forbidden to fire and frightened enough of his own superiors to ask for protection.

On this reading, the letter Leclerc published over Dessalines's name recorded a fait accompli, and was circulated to embarrass him and cut him off from the insurgents rather than to expose treachery.

Bourguignon steps aside from the long quarrel over whether Haitians really practice cannibalism or make zombis, on the grounds that proving or disproving the reports has taught nobody anything. What matters is that the beliefs are held, discussed daily and acted upon, and so form part of the world the peasant actually inhabits.

Treating the anecdotes as folklore, she traces how they hang together. The phrase mange moun covers a wide range of harms, from a sorcerer's debt to a purchased deity to a werewolf draining a child at night, all of them figured as eating, and all supplying an account of illness, death and sudden fortune that natural causes do not. Hostility that cannot be aimed at those with power over one is displaced onto these beings.

Sorcery belief and the vodun cult, she concludes, sustain each other: the danger and the protection issue from the same source.

Woodward sets out to trace, largely from secondary accounts, the course of Toussaint Louverture's fight for the freedom of some half a million enslaved people in France's richest colony. He opens with the island's division between Spain and France, the plantation economy that made the western portion so profitable, and the racial arithmetic — a few tens of thousands of whites and free people of color against a vast enslaved majority — that the decrees of the National Constituent Assembly destabilized in 1791.

From there the narrative follows Toussaint's rise, his maneuvering against French agents and British forces, and the campaign against Leclerc's expedition: the retreat to the mountains, the surrenders of Christophe and Dessalines, and Toussaint's own capitulation at Le Cap in 1802. Seized weeks later and shipped to France, he died in prison the following spring, but the war continued and Dessalines proclaimed independence in 1804.

Middlemen who buy peasant produce and resell it in town markets are routinely blamed for dear food and treated as parasites to be cleared away. Mintz, writing from fieldwork in Jamaica in 1952, makes the opposite case. Small farms feeding the internal economy sit alongside a plantation sector geared to export, and the higgler is what connects the two.

Her efficiency has to be judged against the resources actually available. Higgling absorbs labour that is abundant and idle while economizing on capital, which is scarce; the sheer number of traders, each working thin margins with no price agreements among them, keeps the business genuinely competitive. Clearing them out would require capital better spent elsewhere and would strip income from women whose alternative is domestic service. Citing Bauer on West Africa, Mintz warns against mistaking technical backwardness for economic waste when reform is being planned.

Boyd's study of James Redpath's effort to settle African Americans in Haiti opens on the broader nineteenth-century enthusiasm for colonization. Sending Black Americans beyond the country's borders drew Americans looking for ground between abolitionists and defenders of slavery.

Those who favored it agreed that Black people could never be absorbed into a dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, but they never settled on a method, an agency, or a destination. Jefferson looked to the Louisiana Purchase; others proposed Florida, Texas, lands west of the Mississippi and, as settlement pushed on, sites in Canada and farther south. Roughly twelve thousand Black Americans were shipped to Liberia by the American Colonization Society, a philanthropic body with chapters in both regions.

Baur opens in Port-au-Prince in the first weeks of 1859, amid the celebrations that followed the fall of Faustin I's empire and the restoration of the Republic.

That April the new president, Nicolas Fabre Geffrard, appeared before the national legislature: fifty-three years old, and lately the soldier who had unseated an emperor. After a long speech denouncing the exiled Faustin, he swore fidelity to popular government, announced his first political changes, then picked up a small gavel and struck the imperial crown three times.

The crown became a museum piece after that. What it symbolized, Baur notes, proved harder to be rid of.

Bellegarde sets out to raise the profile of a figure he considers overshadowed by Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines and Christophe. He traces Petion from an unrecognized childhood in Port-au-Prince and a silversmith's apprenticeship through the militia, the war between Rigaud and Toussaint, service in Leclerc's expeditionary force, and his October 1802 decision to turn his division against the French, a defection that drew mulatto officers and maroon bands behind Dessalines.

Three measures define the presidency. He broke up confiscated colonial estates and handed the parcels to soldiers of the independence army, creating a landowning peasantry; he founded a lycee and a girls' school, following Condorcet in making schooling the base of any democratic programme; and he supplied Bolivar with arms, ships and a printing press on the single condition that slavery end wherever the Liberator's forces prevailed.

Bellegarde closes on Petion's mildness, his popular nickname, and his death in 1818 at forty-eight.

Healy opens with the difficulty of judging Toussaint Louverture at all, given a century of European writing on Haiti that she regards as prejudiced rather than merely partisan, and points to recent work rehabilitating Dessalines as a model of what corrective scholarship can achieve.

The assessment that follows is arranged around four roles: liberator of the enslaved, planner of the colony's economy and society, general who drove out Spanish, British and French armies in turn, and statesman who framed a constitution. From these she draws a hemispheric claim. She credits Toussaint with supplying arms and a refuge to the South American independence movements, and with wrecking Leclerc's expedition, which destroyed Napoleon's reason for holding Louisiana. The Purchase followed, doubling the territory of the United States — an outcome she attributes, at one remove, to a man born a slave on the Bréda plantation.

Faustin Soulouque had been enslaved until 1793, could write little beyond his name, and commanded the presidential guard when deadlocked ministers settled on him as a compromise in March 1847. They expected a figurehead. Brandon's sketch follows what they got instead.

The country he inherited was unrecognized abroad, pressed for payment of foreign claims, divided north from south and black from mulatto, and had run through three presidents in three years. Soulouque outlasted his ministers, put down the killings of April 1848, and turned to bringing the eastern part of the island back under Haitian authority, winning at Azua before his troops were routed at Ocoa. To dispel the gloom after that defeat he was proclaimed emperor in 1849 and crowned in 1852 with regalia bought abroad.

The invasions failed, and in January 1859, his soldiers deserting to Geffrard, he sailed into exile.

Faustin Soulouque was an undistinguished career soldier when the Haitian Senate made him president in 1847, apparently expecting a man they could manage; he crowned himself emperor and held power for a dozen years. Baur's portrait, published in 1949, treats the reign as a mixture of farce and slaughter and is unsparing about its subject's illiteracy, superstition and fear.

The judgments extend well beyond the man. Baur reads Boyer's fall in 1843 as the removal of a capable mulatto elite and the start of a racial conflict he considers unresolved, and he ranks the imperial years as the turning point after which Haitian politics settled into despotism and corruption. He allows Soulouque two achievements: territory in the interior retained after the failed invasions of the Dominican Republic, and the preservation of Haitian sovereignty through a diplomatic crisis in which foreign powers pressed hard.

Baur's Boyer is a calculator rather than a hero, and the comparison with Machiavelli is meant as praise for a ruler who kept a hated and encircled republic alive.

The country he took over in 1818 had been ruined by invasion, civil war and the long fight against France, was shunned by the powers that mattered, and was split into rival states. Baur credits him with ending that division, extending his authority across the whole island, and purchasing France's acknowledgment in 1825 at a figure that mortgaged Haitian revenues for generations. The cost at home was compulsory cultivation and a long autocracy, and Baur is candid about both, as he is about the rising of 1843 and the Dominican secession that followed.

The essay closes on Boyer living out his exile in Paris and dying there in 1850, marked by a single line in the Times. Written in 1947, it carries that period's racial vocabulary throughout.

Writing as a government psychiatrist rather than a folklorist, Mars separates what Haitian peasants actually believe about the zombi from what visitors arrive expecting to see. In the countryside the word carries several senses — a soul barred from heaven, the unseen labor thought to explain a farmer's prosperity — within a religious world where spirits mediate between God and the living.

He then turns to the case that made the term famous. In 1936 a ragged, disoriented woman appeared in the streets of Ennery and was identified by a local family as their long-dead relative Félicia Félix-Mentor. Examined in hospital, she could give no account of herself. X-rays found no trace of the fracture that had left the dead woman lame, and the limp resolved once she was fed properly. Mars diagnoses schizophrenia compounded by village hysteria, and faults Zora Neale Hurston for repeating the story as evidence.

Working from fieldwork among cultivators near Plaisance in the north, Simpson sets down what believers there actually hold, warning at the outset against tidying it into a theology. With no scripture and no hierarchy, practice varies between regions and even between neighboring temples, and the inconsistencies are part of the material rather than a defect in it.

He sketches an emergence between roughly 1750 and 1790. Baptism was required of the enslaved and meant little to them; assemblies were forbidden and happened anyway at night; and by the time of the rising, leaders had found the rites useful for binding together groups drawn from different parts of Africa.

The center of the article is the loa. Some are African deities carried across and inherited down the generations; others, Simpson and his predecessors agree, are ancestors raised to that rank locally. Nobody knows the whole roster, and each person recognizes spirits particular to his own household.

Selznick treats bureaucracy not as a synonym for hierarchy and professional administration but as a species of the wider problem of purposive organization. Drawing on Roethlisberger and Dickson's shop-floor study, Barnard's work on executives, and research into prisons, reformatories and similar institutions, he advances a few hypotheses: organizations spontaneously generate informal structures built on personal ties and oriented toward control, and those structures quietly reshape the aims the organization announces.

The distinction carrying the argument is between the goals an organization professes and those it actually operates on. Running an organization throws up daily problems that stated ideals cannot answer, so procedures get improvised, and in time these substitute for the ideals. Officials, once delegated authority, acquire interests of their own, prestige and security of tenure among them, and act with an eye to internal power rather than declared purpose.

Michels' pessimism comes out largely supported, though Selznick insists the drift can be resisted once its mechanics are understood.

Simpson introduces a set of tales collected in northern Haiti in 1937 with an account of how they were performed. Rural storytellers work through mimicry and pantomime with almost no props: a broom serves as a horse, a chair as a man or a water jar, pebbles as charms. The admired ones are asked to wakes, weddings and ceremonies and given the best of the food and drink.

Repertoires vary by teller and audience. Men favour war, cockfights, the loas, loups garous and zombies; women speak of markets, illness, quarrels and love affairs; children prefer the adventures of Bouqui and Ti Malice. A narrator may hold a story back if he suspects someone listening is a loup garou.

The tales themselves range from animal trickery to a boy named The-One-Who-Is-Always-Right, a devil bargaining children for water, and grateful animals granting the power to change shape. Evening storytelling, Simpson notes, was already fading.

The sorcerers of these northern Haitian tales can turn themselves into dogs, horses, trees or other objects, and unlike an ordinary peasant seeking harm to an enemy they need no houngan's help to do it. Simpson observes that suspicion of being a loup garou, never voiced openly, tends to settle on the more prosperous people of a district, and suggests the stories bind the extended family around shared grievances.

The loas are treated as the central figures of the peasant religion. Some came from Africa, others seem to have arisen in Haiti; they differ in appearance, temperament and moral character, and congregations disagree from temple to temple about how each corresponds to a Catholic saint. Every believer has protecting loas owed periodic offerings.

Simpson doubts reports that the cult is collapsing, arguing that the beliefs steady people against real uncertainty and will hold until education, medicine and incomes improve.

Simpson describes a country split into two strata that barely mix and cannot do without each other. The elite is perhaps three percent of the population, entered by birth rather than achievement, and actual government rests with a few hundred men.

The gap is as much cultural as economic. The elite speaks French and the countryside speaks Creole, which the elite understands and the peasantry cannot answer in kind. Physicians and pharmacies serve one side, bocors the other. Law, medicine, politics and the army are the honorable careers, and commerce is disdained. Within the elite, wealth, party and clique cut across one another, party loyalty attaching to particular men rather than programs, and color is weighed constantly while being publicly denied.

Movement upward is narrow. Money alone does not admit a peasant, marriage across the line scarcely occurs, and the usual route has been a successful revolt. Inherited habits of deference hold the arrangement together.

Of the four men Bellegarde names as founders of Haitian independence, Petion is the least known abroad, and this short life sets out to change that.

Two claims carry it. Laws of 1809 and 1814 broke up the old colonial estates and distributed the parcels to soldiers and junior officers of the army of independence, creating a country of smallholders; Bellegarde treats this as the origin of Haiti's rural democracy and credits it with a social stability the political system never had. The constitution of 1816 made elementary schooling free, and Petion, following Condorcet, founded a lycee and a boarding school for girls at Port-au-Prince.

The second claim reaches beyond Haiti. When Bolivar took refuge there in 1815, Petion supplied money, arms and a printing press, declining public credit and asking only that slavery be abolished wherever the Liberator's arms prevailed, a promise made good at Ocumare in July 1816.

Drawn from fieldwork in northern Haiti in 1937, this collection presents coumbite and bal songs in the original with English translations and enough commentary to make their occasions legible. The coumbite is a labour exchange: a farmer feeds his neighbours and hands round tafia while they clear, plant or harvest for him, and obliges himself to work for them in turn. In the north, Simpson notes, no drums accompany the task — only the samba's lead voice and a conch blown now and then to drive the crew on.

The songs carry love, work, injustice, adventure and scandal, and many are satirical or bawdy. Simpson treats the obscene ones less as evidence of repression, sexual opportunity being plentiful, than as a way of making heavy labour bearable, and reads others as a licensed outlet for envy and resentment, comparing them with material collected in West Africa.

Herskovits sets out to make a working concept of a term anthropologists had been using loosely. He tests the competing definitions and shows that separating acculturation from assimilation by whether borrowing runs one way or both, or by whether a people chose freely, collapses under actual cases: the Pawnee, moved to a reservation and taught to farm, cannot be classified either way.

He settles on the formulation drafted for the Social Science Research Council, under which acculturation covers the changes that follow when groups of different cultures enter continuous first-hand contact, and defends its deliberate silence about which culture dominates and whether the exchange is reciprocal. It must be kept distinct from culture change at large and from diffusion.

The book then turns on the existing literature, weighing monographs on Native American and southern African peoples for how far each catches contact as a process rather than reconstructing it in retrospect.

Excavating around Fort Liberté Bay in northern Haiti in 1935, Rainey opened five shell heaps that held chipped flint scrapers, knives and stemmed blades but not a single potsherd. Since deposits elsewhere in the Antilles normally yield pottery and no worked flint, he reads these sites as the remains of a separate and earlier people, one preceding the pottery-making cultures found across the islands at the time of the conquest.

Six further middens in the same district did contain ceramics, and these he sorts into two ornamental styles, Carrier and Meillac, both belonging to the wider complex he calls the Shell Culture and associates with Arawak speakers. Stratigraphy in Puerto Rico had placed that complex above a still older Crab Culture; nothing of the sort turned up in north Haiti. Grinding stones, notched stone axes and fragments of red ocher accompanied the flint.

Drawn from fieldwork in 1931, this survey moves through four aspects of Dahomean life. It opens with the economy: every man farms whatever else he does, and women run the markets and keep what they earn, which supports a recognized class of independent women.

Collective labour is organized through the dokpwe, an association of a community's men under a chief who inherits his post and whose duties link communal farming to the conduct of funerals. A sick man's fields are worked for him as a matter of course. Above all this stood the absolutism of the monarchy.

Herskovits then considers people who fit their own culture badly, artists especially, and closes on religion. He rejects the idea of Mawu as a supreme god on the Christian pattern, arguing that the great deities name pantheons rather than persons, and treats charms revealed to hunters by the forest creature Aziza as sympathetic magic that no longer justifies the word fetishism.

Morgan takes up a treaty that historians have largely set aside. The peace of Ryswick, he notes, has attracted no serious English-language treatment since Macaulay's late-life sketch, and French and German scholars have passed over its commercial and colonial dimensions entirely.

That neglect, on Morgan's account, is hard to justify. Ryswick sits at the hinge of European diplomacy between Nimeguen in 1678 and Utrecht in 1713 — at once a gloss on the first and an opening onto the second. He also finds the bargaining itself worth attention, describing the conduct of the negotiations as among the least diplomatic in modern history, with the Emperor's endless stalling in a category of its own.

Morgan's own emphasis falls on the economic and colonial terms at stake in the talks.

Addressing the Royal Geographical Society, Stuart makes a case for an island he thinks Europe has stopped thinking about: large, well placed, once the object of enormous expectation, and in his account now sunk in a poverty that commerce will eventually reverse.

Most of the paper is descriptive. He gives dimensions and coastline, distinguishes three separate mountain systems, works through the lakes and mineral springs, and rates the harbors, singling out Samana Bay and Port-au-Prince as far ahead of the rest. Timber, dye-woods, indigo and coffee get short histories, alongside a sober American assessment of how little gold is really recoverable. He puts the two republics at about seven hundred thousand people on land that could carry ten times as many, and reviews the failed schemes to attract settlers.

The historical pages lean on Oviedo, Las Casas and Charlevoix, reproducing their contemptuous portrait of the island's first inhabitants.

Trouillot's account of how the Haitian Revolution was silenced has a second half that scholarship has largely passed over: the demand that history be told from the perspective of the colonized. Daut takes it up by reading two Haitian writers who were themselves participants — Boisrond-Tonnerre, whose Mémoire appeared in 1804, and the Baron de Vastey, whose Système colonial dévoilé followed a decade later.

Both wrote, she argues, to keep the former colonists from having the last word: to shape foreign opinion through the press, and to fix a national memory in which the revolution is an origin story rather than an atrocity. She also traces how they were dismissed. Nineteenth-century European and American commentators questioned whether Haitians had written their own books, or whether the books mattered; later historians who explained Haiti's troubles by color prejudice among Haitians extended the same logic, relocating blame onto the country itself.

Hebblethwaite approaches the history of Haitian Creole through the language of Vodou. The rites and the sacred songs performed during services are in Haitian Creole, but their vocabulary reaches well beyond it, carrying items traceable to West African languages such as Fon, Yoruba, Ewe and Igbo, as well as to West Central African sources.

The available description breaks off at that point, before the study's findings, so its conclusions about those borrowings are not represented here.

How the army came to own Haiti's economy is the question here. Gerlus answers it from the revolution itself: the estates the French left behind were nationalized, and the state that absorbed them was in practice the officer corps, which converted public property into the basis of a class of its own.

The framing draws on debates about the state's role in accumulation, from Marx and Engels through later theorists of development, and is then grounded in the conditions of a new nation cut off diplomatically and governed almost without interruption by soldiers.

The second half explains why military governments failed to revive plantation exports. Coercion could not hold workers on estates they were able to walk away from, and former slaves who fed themselves from their own plots were never made dependent on a wage. Without that dependence, Gerlus argues, no policy of production could take hold, whatever the rulers intended.

Fiehrer sets out to give substance to a phrase often invoked and seldom examined: Louisiana's connection to the Caribbean. He follows French settlement of northwestern Hispaniola from the buccaneering decades through the Treaty of Ryswick to a colony whose enslaved population grew steadily until 1803, and traces the move from indigo to the sugar and coffee that made planters rich enough to resent the Crown's monopolists and the Nantes slavers.

Much of the essay is corrective. Refugee families of the lower Mississippi cherish a story of narrow escape from butchery, and the antebellum press supplied the imagery: a docile bondswoman on one side, a cannibal insurgent on the other. Measured against correspondence, census returns and the numbers who reached Cuba, France and the eastern seaboard over fourteen years of movement, the tale of mass killing has thin support.

Through the eighteenth century the two colonies depended on one another, and many south Louisianians descend from those who left.

A documentary collection built around a long introductory history of the French Caribbean between 1789 and 1804. The introduction sets the ground: buccaneers who became planters, a colony the size of Maryland producing two-fifths of Europe's sugar and three-fifths of its coffee, and a labour regime so lethal that a third to a half of those who survived the Atlantic crossing died within a few years of arrival.

The narrative runs from the insurrection of August 1791, launched by a coalition of African-born and island-born plantation workers, through the emancipation decrees of 1793 and 1794, to Bonaparte's attempt at reconquest, which succeeded in Guadeloupe and failed in Saint-Domingue.

The documents gathered afterwards come from every side: planters and free men of colour, French officials and generals, Toussaint Louverture's colonial constitution, Delgres's last proclamation, American reactions, and Vodou songs about Dessalines. Maps, a chronology and questions for discussion accompany them.

Born a slave on Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture obtained his freedom, took up planting on a modest scale, and bought slaves of his own. Girard makes that contradiction central rather than incidental.

The book follows Louverture from freedman to revolutionary leader, crediting him with planning the slave revolt of 1791, and on to 1801, when he governed the colony in which he had once been property. What he wanted throughout, acceptance as a member of the colonial elite, he never received; he died after a year in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless fed movements for Black nationalism and against colonial rule far into the twentieth century.

Girard draws on extensive research in primary sources, conducted in archives in many countries and in several languages, and the publisher presents the result as the definitive life of Louverture.