Renda asks what nineteen years in Haiti did to the United States. The invasion of 1915 installed a puppet president, dispersed the legislature under arms, seized the customs houses, imposed a constitution friendlier to foreign investment and a system of forced labour, and killed Haitians in numbers that may have reached eleven thousand. In Haitian history this is a notorious chapter; in American history, barely a footnote.

Her method is to read the occupation as culture. Marines were not equipment to be positioned but men who had to be enlisted into the business of ruling, and paternalism was the language that enlisted them, from a cartoon marine scolding a childlike Haiti to Smedley Butler telling senators that the country was an estate held in trust for minors.

Renda follows those images home, through Seabrook's bestselling book and the schoolboys who wrote to a Marine sergeant, arguing that empire runs on stories as much as on guns.

By 1789 two-thirds of France's overseas trade came out of a single Caribbean possession, San Domingo, and the whole of that wealth — arguably the most profitable colony anywhere — was generated by half a million people held in slavery.

When the unrest set off by the French Revolution crossed the Atlantic in 1791, it split the loyalties of the island's white population. The enslaved, who had been treated with great brutality, took the opening and rose against their owners. James follows that rebellion, the one slave revolt in history to succeed, and gives an unsparing portrait of the man who led it.

Toussaint L'Ouverture emerges from the account as, in James's phrase, one of the most remarkable men of an age already full of them — a judgment the book earns rather than assumes.

France occupied the middle ground in the Atlantic slave trade — in how long it took part, what share it carried, how quickly it withdrew, and in the mortality and sex ratios recorded aboard its ships. Geggus surveys the Du Bois Institute dataset of just over four thousand French slaving voyages, sketching the trade's timing, its African sources and the age and sex of the captives, before turning to the Caribbean colonies that received nine ships in ten.

Those colonies drew on different parts of Africa, according to crop, to when each was settled, and to what merchants found convenient: Saint-Domingue took nearly half its captives from West Central Africa, Martinique nearly half from the Bight of Benin, Guadeloupe an unusual share from Biafra. Geggus uses the pattern to revisit why Ewe-Fon elements dominate Vodou's vocabulary and pantheon despite Kongo numbers, and to argue that Kongo influence has been steadily underrated.

Outsiders have read Haitian Vodou through stereotype for two centuries — as the antithesis of civilization in the nineteenth, as demonic possession and zombis during the American occupation, as horror-film material in the 1980s. The careful ethnographies of Herskovits, Métraux, Deren and others were written against that backdrop and marked by it.

Dubois surveys four works from the 1990s that register a shift, among them Cosentino's museum catalogue on Vodou's sacred arts and collections on Afro-Atlantic religion more broadly. He gives most attention to Joan Dayan's Haiti, History and the Gods, which reads possession as a form of historical memory: Dessalines returning as the lwa Ogou Dessaline, and Ezili — the pale, French-speaking Freda beside the black, voiceless, violent Dantò — as a medium for the sexual and racial domination the colony produced. Taken together, these books make the case for treating religion and history as a single problem.

Taking a line from Orwell about surrendering to words, Brubaker and Cooper argue that the social sciences have done exactly that with identity. The term means too much when used strongly, too little when used weakly, and often nothing at all, and the confusion carries intellectual and political costs.

The constructivist rescue is no help either. Calling identities made, shifting and plural, so as to acquit the word of essentialism, leaves no reason to keep it, and no way to account for self-understandings that harden, for categories imposed coercively from outside, or for the singular belonging that identity politics actually seeks.

They propose dividing the work among plainer terms: identification and categorization for what people and institutions do to themselves and each other; self-understanding and social location for the situated sense a person has of where they stand and what that disposes them to do; and commonality, connectedness and groupness for the felt cohesion of a group.

Dash's survey opens with the land, a mountainous terrain that struck European colonizers as forbidding, then lays down a historical spine running from French rule through independence, the American occupation of the early twentieth century, the Duvalier years, and the present day. That chronology frames all that follows.

A chapter on people and society dwells on the pride Haitians take in a black state born of the only slave revolution that succeeded, and moves across the social range from the elite to peasants and slum dwellers, with attention to Haitians abroad. Religion gets its own treatment, centered on the fusion of Roman Catholicism with vaudou, brought from West Africa. Another remarks on the joy people find despite hard economic conditions.

Media, literature, and language are handled against the political record, with a section on writing in Creole. Later chapters cover vaudou jazz and dance, rara rock, and the folkloric debts of Haitian painting. A chronology and glossary close the book.

This volume takes the African continent through the two centuries before 1790, a period when contact with Europe reached deep at only one point: trade, and above all trade in people. The editorial introduction tracks the escalation — roughly 13,000 captives shipped across the Atlantic yearly in the seventeenth century, more than 60,000 by the middle of the eighteenth — and the spread of the plantation system into the Indian Ocean.

Its emphasis falls on how much of the pace Africans still controlled. Europeans depended on African rulers and intermediaries; Benin barred the export of male captives, Loango traded ivory and copper instead, and decentralised societies could retaliate against raiders. The demographic consequences are treated as genuinely unsettled, since population figures are missing at both ends of the period. Regional chapters follow, among them a treatment of Ottoman Egypt, the Funj sultanate and Darfur.

Sheller looks at how Haitians argued about popular participation in political life, centering on the Liberal Revolution of 1843 and, the year after, the Piquet Rebellion.

The liberal challenge to President Boyer's regime opened room that a peasant movement moved into. The Piquets, who called themselves the Army of Sufferers, demanded civil and political rights for black Haitians.

Tracing the revolutionary situation of 1843 and 1844 through three phases, the article shows political actors inside Haiti weighing rival institutional and constitutional arrangements against one another.

Blackburn opens by describing the system that was about to come under attack. By 1770 New World slavery was not a leftover from an older order but something new. The sugar estate, with its calibrated labour and mechanical rhythms, half anticipated the factory, and the planter was an entrepreneur who could sit out war or slump on his estate's own subsistence and then expand hard when markets beckoned.

He separates this from the ancillary slavery of the early Spanish empire, where wealth came from conquering and taxing indigenous populations, and ties the newer form's growth to European appetite: sugar, tobacco and cotton were small pleasures that pulled ordinary people into a money economy and paid useful revenue to states.

The arithmetic is stark. Some six million captives landed in the Americas during the eighteenth century against roughly a million Europeans, with mortality so severe that a trade on that scale was needed merely to keep numbers from falling.

Blanning's introduction sets out what the volume's contributors have made of Europe since the French Revolution, and it reads largely as a study in how badly the continent handled its own modernization. Population more than doubled in the nineteenth century, life expectancy and literacy rose, and the class war Marx expected never came; the clergy lost most, the aristocracy diversified, and the middle classes set the cultural tone.

Culture is Blanning's own subject. Released from patronage by a literate public, the artist gained enormous status and then acquired a new master in the market, a friction he treats as productive rather than merely corrosive.

The twentieth-century chapters are bleaker: a single European civil war running from 1914 to 1945, a 1919 settlement that guaranteed the next round, a left divided against itself until too late, and total war ending in the Holocaust and the bomb.

Teaching the French Revolution means choosing what to leave out, and Saint-Domingue has usually been what gets left out. Garrigus argues the separation is artificial. A syllabus confined to the metropole cannot pose the question of who counted as French, which is precisely the question the colony forced.

The essay is deliberately practical. Assuming no instructor will add a book to an existing reading list, it points to accessible sources in English for teachers and students, supplies background, and suggests a lecture or two that could be reworked, with examples of colleagues who have built the Caribbean into the structure of a course rather than bolting it on at the end.

The rationale is that Haiti gives students the clearest case of nation and race being made rather than found: the first population outside Europe to throw off colonial rule, in a society whose divisions came out of the plantation itself.

Essays written over two decades set out a Caribbean poetics against both the totalizing claims of Western historiography and negritude's backward gaze toward Africa. Martinique, absorbed into France as an overseas department, is Glissant's extreme case: a place of what he calls nonhistory, where the dates that organize the record — abolition, the franchise, departmental status — were all settled elsewhere, and where the ruin of local production has left imitation as the only identity on offer.

Against this he proposes antillanité, a Caribbeanness founded on relation rather than descent. Creolization, not ancestry, is the region's governing process, and its emblems are the maroon's flight from the plantation, the carnival crowd, the whole forest rather than the single commanding tree.

Wandering away, in his terms diversion, counts for nothing unless reversion completes it by carrying people back to the point of entanglement, where the work must be done or they perish.

The volume's introduction surveys five and a half centuries of African history and makes communication its organising problem. Islam crossed the Sahara and ran down the East African coast, but the editor stresses how unlike the two cases were: in West Africa it entered existing societies, while the towns south of the Juba were foreign settlements around which African populations gathered, which is why the faith travelled so little way inland there.

Elsewhere the story is internal and the evidence thin. Radiocarbon dating had only lately become reliable enough for this period, so much depends on the older layers of oral tradition and on the first outside reports.

Two settlement patterns are drawn out. South of Hausaland lay walled towns supporting ironworking, weaving, dyeing and tanning, with cavalry behind their formation and open ground inside the walls for country people. West of the Volta, village kingdoms and the gold and kola trade of Dyula merchants did comparable work without horsemen.

This volume runs from roughly the mid-first millennium BC to the opening of the second millennium AD. Its editor concedes an awkwardness at the outset: the sources for northern Africa are far richer than for anywhere else, so the north can be handled in detail while the rest requires hypothesis, which risks making outsiders look more consequential than Africans.

Against that, Fage argues for a unity of subject on a continental scale. This is the stretch in which something recognisable as history begins almost everywhere in Africa, with only two exceptions: Egypt, long since part of an older written tradition, and the arid, thinly peopled south-west, which was still barely inside history as late as the nineteenth century. The volume opens with a long archaeological essay on the legacy of prehistory, reaching back through the Plio-Pleistocene toolmakers and Homo erectus, as the ground on which particular African cultures later took shape.

Two contradictions frame Hurbon's account. Vodou took shape under slavery and helped bring it down, yet independent Haiti banned it and both state and Catholic Church spent the following century persecuting it. And when the elite finally acknowledged it in the 1930s as part of the national culture, the recognition was promptly exploited by a dictatorship that ran from 1957 to 1986.

Ritual and possession cannot be understood apart from that political history, which is also why the elite could not treat Vodou as a religion at all. What emerged from the meeting of African and European practice is something he describes as a dialogue with the other carried on internally — a religion with no ambition to conquer. Undoing the prejudice adherents have absorbed about themselves will take open public debate rather than ethnography, and a state that protects belief without legislating on it.

A picture-based reference for everyday English vocabulary, issued here in a Haitian Creole edition. Each English word is paired with its Kreyol equivalent, printed in blue directly beneath it, and the book supplies a full index in the second language.

The Haitian Creole version is one of twelve bilingual editions of the same dictionary, others being Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and more.

The edition opens with a long general introduction that sets the plays among the conditions which produced them. It begins with the thinness of the biographical record, Greene's sneer at an upstart player and Chettle's handsome retraction, and with the standing of a playwright as artisan rather than man of letters; then with the accidents of transmission, scripts owned outright by the company, half of them reaching print in garbled quartos, the rest gathered by Heminge and Condell in 1623.

From there it follows the reputation, from parity with Jonson and Fletcher through Dryden's praise to Johnson's preface of 1765, which rescued Shakespeare from the charge of untutored genius. Later sections take up the language and the loosening of the blank-verse line from end-stopped speech toward enjambment and feminine endings, the working of the imagery, the playhouse, and the genres, including late romances that verge on tragicomedy.

Citizenship was built for people who stay put, and Laguerre argues that it no longer fits. He begins with Randolph Bourne's account of a transnational America, a country remade by each wave of arrivals and, through them, tied to the places those arrivals came from, so that the state ceases to be the only site where citizenship is practised.

Haitian Americans are the case. Their primary ties run to Haiti, secondary ones to fellow migrants in Montreal, Paris and Santo Domingo, and the group is stratified less by ethnicity than by legal status, since refugee, student, resident, citizen and undocumented each mark out a different daily life.

From this Laguerre argues that equality is won on the ground of citizenship rather than ethnicity, and that citizenship must be redefined to hold plural allegiance. Diaspora here is both a place of residence and a state of mind, passed on across generations.

The end of Dahomey's women soldiers is fixed with certainty: 4 November 1892, when they fought the French for the last time at the gates of Cana. Their beginning is not. Alpern observes that published guesses about the corps's founding stretch across more than two centuries, from the reign of Wegbaja to that of Glele.

Weighing the candidates, Alpern rules out both kings, while granting Wegbaja much the stronger claim. That claim rests on a tradition crediting him with the gbeto, a corps of elephant huntresses, together with the conjecture that this unit became the first body of women soldiers. Even the tradition wobbles: one version has him merely reorganizing huntresses who already existed, and another explanation holds simply that palace women supplied the king's table with game. Reports that he kept women as guards are unsourced or unprovable, and nobody has claimed he sent women into battle.

Dupuy examines Haiti's recent political history, setting out the policies and strategies pursued both by President Aristide and by the United States. The treatment is organized around an explicit analytic framework and weighs domestic and foreign factors together rather than privileging either.

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.