The protest cry setting the children of Petion against the children of Dessalines still circulates in Haitian political life. Mocombe asks where it came from, using the structurationist and structural Marxist account of consciousness he calls phenomenological structuralism.

The slogan is usually heard in racial terms, with Petion standing for the neoliberal outlook of the mulatto elite and Dessalines for the economic reform and social justice voiced by the African masses. Mocombe's suggestion is that the two figures now function as categories of class struggle within a capitalist world-system under American hegemony, and that the African majority, the children of Sans Souci, bears the cost.

Payton approaches the Duvalier decades through what got built. Clearing slums, laying transport infrastructure, and the business and politics of cement in Port-au-Prince supply the evidence for a fresh account of how place was made in a Caribbean capital between 1957 and 1986.

The argument runs both ways. How the city was built lodged the regime's politics, its economy, and its social order in physical form; the changes to that fabric then worked back on the dictatorship's own unstable inner life. Construction figures as part of how the regime operated, not as scenery behind it.

Payton offers the result as a new way of writing the history of place in the Caribbean, and sets its intertwined threads in a longer frame as well: power distributed unevenly across the country's protracted movement from slavery toward freedom.

Mayes and Jayaram introduce a collection built around a single proposition: Haiti and the Dominican Republic should be studied as one interconnected island rather than as two national cases. They trace how research shifted after the 1990s, as both economies moved from agriculture toward export processing and tourism, both saw poverty fall hardest on women, and both came to depend on money sent home from abroad.

Their framework revises transnationalism in three ways. It insists that those who stay are as much part of the story as those who leave, and asks what keeps particular people in place. It denies that cross-border movement is recent, following Trouillot in dating Caribbean entanglement with global capital to 1492.

And it argues that Hispaniola exemplifies the transnational distinctively, through the spread of republicanism, nineteenth-century antillanismo, and a shared twentieth-century history of American occupation and economic dependence.

Seasonal labor migration from Haiti to Cuba sits at the center of how the early twentieth-century Caribbean is narrated, in questions of race, of national development, and of United States imperial power. Casey reconstructs what that migration was actually like for the workers who undertook it.

Following them between rural and urban Haiti and the sugar plantations, coffee farms, and cities of eastern Cuba, the study fills a substantial gap and offers a close view of how empire, labor, and political economy operated day to day in both countries.

Migrants were not simply moved around by these forces. Their attempts to improve the conditions in which they lived and worked, and to keep practicing their religions, left marks on migration policy, on economic life, on how race was understood, and on Caribbean spiritual practice, in a period when Haiti and Cuba were each living under United States domination.

A photograph of Jean Price-Mars sitting across from Nelson Rockefeller at the Haitian-American Institute in 1944 opens Verna's account of the decade or so after the occupation ended. She uses it to unsettle a historiography organised around American domination and Haitian resistance, arguing that the pairing is too blunt to explain what educated Haitians were actually doing.

From the late 1930s into the late 1940s, officials, intellectuals and members of the professional class actively sought American scholarships, expertise and institutional partnerships, expecting gains in status, in public health and schooling, and in Haiti's standing abroad. They were not a united group: indigenistes, Francophiles, socialists and admirers of the United States pursued incompatible ends through the same channels.

Verna's claim is that Haitians helped shape inter-American affairs rather than merely absorbing them, and that these years offer a case where outcomes were not settled in advance.

A large body of research ties organizational effectiveness to leadership; another ties it to culture. What has been missing, Jacques argues, is any account of how the two operate together when an organization is failing, and which of them weighs more heavily. No study had examined the question in the Haitian community at all.

Haitian churches serve as the site. Working phenomenologically, Jacques gathers detailed accounts from eighteen people who belong or once belonged to four congregations in Boston and nearby cities in the northeastern United States, examining organizational structure from the inside through what members have lived.

Culture shapes how these churches function, but leadership proves the dominant influence on how well or badly they do. Their inability to grow and thrive, Jacques concludes, comes down to leaders whose mentality has not evolved with the times; remedying it means deliberately building the right infrastructure and getting proper leadership training.

Pressley-Sanon assembles her account of Haiti from oral stories and visual art gathered on the island and in two African countries she treats as its motherlands.

The aim is recovery — histories that have gone under the surface — and the means are drawn from Haiti's own deep spiritual and cultural traditions, which supply the book its method rather than merely its material.

Lahens tells the story of one Haitian family across four generations, all of them living under and struggling against a curse. The writing is lyrical and the mood haunted; the novel has been recognized with awards.

White opens with Lincoln's funeral train carrying the body home to Springfield, and with the question the mourning left unsettled: who exactly counted as the People whom the assassin could not kill. Not everyone grieved, and the demand for vengeance narrowed quickly from the South at large to the conspirators.

From there the book treats the three decades to 1896 as a single project rather than a failure followed by an excess. Reconstruction belongs, on this reading, to a longer effort at building a nation on the model Henry Clay had urged — federal money, federal improvements, institutions on a continental scale — an effort ambitious in conception and often unlucky in execution.

Measured against the ideal it began with, a country of self-reliant households in small Protestant towns, what actually arrived was corporations of unprecedented size, troops at Homestead and Pullman, a class of industrial magnates, a Republican party in their service, and the abandonment of racial equality.

Forsdick and Høgsbjerg open their account of the man later called Toussaint Louverture with a caution about evidence. He was born enslaved sometime in the early 1740s; the precise date will probably never be established, and the surviving stories of his childhood contradict one another or cannot be checked, which points to legend as their source.

Rather than adjudicate those claims immediately, the chapter turns first to the setting that shaped him, Saint-Domingue as it was when he was born, and reaches back to Columbus's landing on Hispaniola in 1492 to begin that account. The passage available here breaks off at that point.

Nessler treats the Haitian Revolution as an event that covered the whole island of Hispaniola and reached across the Caribbean, rather than one confined to French territory.

The book sets the history of Saint-Domingue, which became Haiti, next to that of Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic, and shows how thoroughly the two were entangled. Neither the line between them nor the question of who governed what was as settled as later maps suggest, and developments on each side shaped the other.

Schuller's book comes out of an independent study of eight camps for people displaced by Haiti's earthquake, from which more than 150 interviews were gathered. Those interviewed ranged from earthquake survivors living in the camps to Haitian front-line staff and camp managers to foreign aid personnel.

What the account documents is a gap between the size of the response, running to billions of dollars, and what it produced on the ground. The relief effort did not merely fall short; it set off consequences no one intended, tearing at established social and cultural arrangements and driving violence upward, with women absorbing much of it.

Because the testimony comes from several positions inside the same operation at once, the same events can be viewed from the camps and from the agencies that were meant to be serving them.

Marking a hundred years since United States marines landed in 1915, Sommers and Delices examine the economic interests, racial assumptions, and hard-power calculations that ran through American dealings with Haiti before the occupation began.

Rather than asking whether the United States as a whole profited from empire, a framing they set aside as exhausted, the study asks who in particular gained and how much power those people had to shape policy. It also presses on what the state actually is when foreign policy is made.

Two figures get close attention: Woodrow Wilson, whose racial thinking is dissected alongside his decision to intervene, and Admiral William Caperton, whose conduct reveals the attitudes that let military commanders carry out an occupation. The lens then widens to the American press, read here as a promoter of commercial opportunity. Taken together, the chapters answer why, by whom, and how empire was pursued in this case.

A collection of poems by Georges, Boston's poet laureate, working in African American letters.

The praise the book carries comes from the poet Afaa Michael Weaver, who hears in it a fresh account of where poetry begins, and an intelligence careful enough to step across light lying on water. Weaver describes the poems as language choosing its own form, moving through history that has not been spoken, and taking up the space where music leaves off and poetry arrives to name what lasts and what belongs only to the moment.

Accounts of the Age of Revolution have long centered on France and the thirteen colonies. Gaffield's volume joins a growing case for treating what happened in Haiti as the third of the era's world-shaping events.

That revolution was the only slave uprising ever to succeed, and the declaration it produced in 1804 marks a break in how social, economic and political life would afterward be arranged. It brought a second independent country into being in the Americas, and it established a new kind of political text.

For all the weight now given to Haiti internationally, the declaration itself has only recently begun to receive close attention: the circumstances of its making, its actual wording, and what followed from it.

Dillon and Drexler bring together work on what the Haitian Revolution meant for the young United States, reading the upheaval in the colony against the country's own early development.

Burnard and Garrigus set the two largest slave societies of the eighteenth-century Caribbean side by side and argue that what they shared mattered more than the empires governing them. Sugar planters in both treated enslaved people at once as workers and as unusually liquid capital, to be sold, pledged as security or hired out, an outlook the authors read as of a piece with the emerging mentality of industrial and financial capitalism.

Technology followed from that logic rather than resisting it. There was no reason to mechanize planting while cane still had to be cut by hand, but after 1750 planters grew keenly interested in anything that raised estate profits, and gang labour already made a machine of the cutter.

The pairing is deliberate. Rather than a formal comparison in the Tannenbaum tradition, which foundered on the difficulty of defining treatment, the book gives a paired portrait of two societies moving down parallel tracks.

Eller opens with a felled palm: the Tree of Liberty planted in Santo Domingo under Boyer and toppled by unknown hands one night in 1864. From it she works outward into a history that refuses to treat the island's two halves as separate stories.

Her subject is the Dominican war against Spanish reannexation after 1861 and the rural people who fought it. A tiny lettered elite, contemptuous of a peasantry descended partly from maroons, left them almost undocumented; they lived by woodcutting, hunting, livestock and honey, largely outside the reach of any state, and held to a rough equality, to decision-making in their own communities, and above all to land and subsistence. Fear of re-enslavement raced through the territory, and whole families abandoned and burned their towns rather than submit.

Haitians helped them repeatedly, their own survival being at stake. That solidarity, Eller argues, later national narratives worked hard to erase.

Daut picks up a line of argument running through Ronald Paulson, Lynn Hunt, and Françoise Vergès, each of whom has found oedipal structures in the way revolution gets represented, whether in writing, in images, or in politics. Victor Séjour's story "Le Mulâtre" has already supplied one instance.

Hunt's explanation for the pattern is historical before it is psychological. Eighteenth-century Europeans were in the habit of picturing a ruler as a father and a nation as a family enlarged, which made such metaphors ready to hand. Under the ancien régime, on her account, ordinary French people could scarcely conceive of revolution except as the overthrow of a father-king. From that premise the chapter moves to a comparison.

Independence in 1804 left Haiti's leaders with a survival problem: the new nation needed strong ties to other states. They looked hardest at the United States, home to a sizeable free black population that included vocal champions of emigration and colonization. Through the 1820s, President Jean-Pierre Boyer helped move thousands of black Americans to Haiti, promising land, commercial opportunity and, above all, a black state.

The appeal reached opposed constituencies. Black community leaders and journalists presented emigration as a way to resist discrimination and prove the race an equal on the world stage; antislavery whites wanted to support a nation founded by liberated slaves; businessmen of both races saw trade; racist whites saw a way to export America's race problem.

Migration ebbed by the decade's end as emigrants found the republic was no black Eden. Fanning reconstructs the campaign's rise and fall from letters, diaries, travellers' reports, newspapers and American, British and French consular records.

Gaffield reconstructs Haiti's first years of independence through its dealings with Britain, France, the United States, Denmark and the Batavian Republic, and finds far more contact than the familiar picture of total isolation allows. The Atlantic wars of the period structured those dealings: belligerent powers and neutral ones operated under different customary rules, which gave Britain a latitude in approaching Haitian leaders that Washington, Copenhagen and Amsterdam did not have.

Much of the argument concerns evidence. Haitian repositories hold little from these years, having suffered disaster, underfunding, political upheaval and theft, and scholars have read that silence as proof of abandonment. Following one document to the next from Paris to Jamaica, London, Washington, the Netherlands and Denmark, Gaffield assembles parliamentary and congressional debate, diplomatic and merchant letters, and court records instead.

What emerges is local agents improvising policy toward Dessalines, Petion and Christophe with little direction from home, and merchants shaping decisions that racism alone cannot explain.

Louis works among Haitian migrants in the Bahamas, where Protestant churches have displaced the Catholic parish at the centre of religious life. His hinge is a distinction his interlocutors draw between Pwotestan and Kretyen, the second naming a stricter, baptized, morally serious believer. It lets them criticize their own compatriots while describing the kind of citizen they think Haiti needs.

He sets this beside figures charting Protestant growth from a sliver of Haiti's population in 1930 to roughly a third, with the same movement visible in New York and elsewhere in the diaspora, and against a scholarship still largely occupied with Catholicism and Vodou. For his consultants, being genuinely Christian is the route to personal salvation and to repairing the country. Pat Robertson's claim that the earthquake settled a bargain struck at Bois Caïman did not startle them, because it matched a reading of the Haitian past they already held.

Trouillot's subject is how historical narratives get made, and by whom. They are produced unevenly, by groups and individuals with markedly unequal access to the means of production, and the forces involved — quieter than gunfire or property — are not for that reason weaker. He refuses both the claim that we are captives of the past and the claim that history is simply whatever anyone makes of it.

The opening example is the Alamo. Santa Anna took the mission in March 1836 and lost at San Jacinto six weeks later, where Houston's men shouted its name as they attacked. In doing so they made history twice over: as actors capturing a general, and as narrators who converted a defeat into the trial that made victory inevitable.

That doubleness runs through the book, which works on the ambiguity of the word itself — what happened, and what is said to have happened — and on the silences that separate them.

Between 1798 and 1801, in the middle of the Haitian Revolution, John Adams and Toussaint Louverture built a working diplomatic relationship, one that let white Americans back the liberty and self-rule of Saint-Domingue's people of color. The United States sent economic aid along with arms and munitions, and the conflict became the first occasion on which the U.S. Navy fought on behalf of a foreign ally.

Johnson, a historian and former diplomat, gives the alliance its first book-length treatment, setting out what these two revolutionary peoples wanted and how each maneuvered in a hostile Atlantic world. Leaders on both sides managed multiracial dealings in settings organized around slavery and racial hierarchy.

The diplomacy did not end American slavery, but it changed how slavery and race were argued about in the Atlantic world well into the twentieth century. No durable alliance followed, and the two republics went their separate ways.

A collaborative volume that reads the age of revolutions from the Mediterranean outward, tracing how ideas, exiles, capital and images moved between southern Europe and the Americas between the Seven Years' War and the 1860s. Its first section follows a Neapolitan route: Genovesi's imagined travels, the Enlightenment at Naples, Charles III between Spain and the Indies, the expelled Spanish Jesuits, and the long quarrel over the nature of the New World.

Later sections track revolutionary echoes across the ocean, constitutional experiments running from Cadiz to South America and the pull of English constitutional models within the Mediterranean, and finally the making of new nations, with republics and federations, caudillos and temporary dictatorships, Spanish and Italian exiles in London, and the slow passage out of slavery.

Geggus contributes a chapter on Saint-Domingue, whose fifteen-year upheaval he calls the most transformative of the period, and whose exports underwrote French Atlantic prosperity as far as Marseille.

The revolution in Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804 remains the one slave rebellion in which enslaved and formerly enslaved people ended slavery and founded an independent state, which is why Ferrer describes it as possibly modernity's most radical upheaval. Fifty miles away in Spanish Cuba, its effect ran the other way.

Cuban planters and authorities watched the neighboring colony come apart and moved to ensure nothing similar happened to them, reinforcing slavery and colonial rule instead. Slave society in Cuba was thus violently entrenched at exactly the moment when a nearby example of enslaved people destroying slavery was impossible to ignore.

Ferrer's method is to refuse the usual separation between these two histories. Told as one linked sequence rather than two national stories, the Haitian Revolution and the rise of Cuban slave society each cast fresh light on the other, and on Caribbean and Atlantic history in the period.

Fatton's diagnosis is that Haiti has fallen out of the periphery of the world economy into something worse. He calls it the outer periphery: a zone occupied by states under international tutelage, where politics is zero-sum and catastrophe recurrent. Three forces put Haiti there, in his account, namely an externally imposed neoliberal order, a chronic crisis of governability, and the earthquake of January 2010.

Domestic actors are not spared. With production stagnant, closeness to state power becomes the readiest route to wealth for anyone outside the established elite, since the state still issues licences, collects taxes and controls force. The result is patronage, criminal arrangement and networks of banditry linking businessmen, politicians and officers.

Meanwhile aid dependence and the proliferation of NGOs have hollowed the state to the point of virtual trusteeship, leaving a country sustained by remittances and foreign assistance and confined to the cheapest end of global production.

Joseph reads the Haitian Revolution as a religious event as much as a political one, and builds his book around figures whose theology has rarely been treated as theology. He opens with a survey of recent North American scholarship, naming what he calls a Haitian Turn in how the field now handles freedom, modernity and the Enlightenment.

At the centre is a close reading of the prayer attributed to Dutty Boukman at Bois Caïman in August 1791. Placing it beside James Cone's writing on the God of the oppressed, Joseph argues that Boukman articulated a black liberation theology long before the term existed, one that dismantled the master's God and claimed divine vindication for the enslaved. A companion chapter reads François Makandal's campaign of violence through Fanon's account of decolonization and revolutionary humanism.

Two closing chapters follow Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes, who weighed Christianity and Vodou differently but both took the revolution as proof of black self-determination.

Smith writes the entangled histories of the eighteenth century's two richest sugar colonies after bondage ended in each: Haiti independent from 1804, Jamaica emancipated in 1838. This is not comparison in the strict sense. The two are handled separately at points and then sewn back together, on the argument that each remained present in how the other saw the world.

The connection predates 1804, with Saint-Domingue emigres such as the Espeut family arriving in Kingston with the people they held, and it thickened afterwards through refugees, exiles, labourers and others crossing between the islands.

What binds the two is a shared struggle over what freedom would mean once the plantation order broke down. Ruling classes on both sides fought vainly to hold that order together, majorities were shut out of politics, economies failed, fires and earthquakes compounded the strain. The book ends on divergence, with the American occupation of 1915 testing Haitian freedom again.

Vastey published this book in 1814 as chief publicist for Christophe's kingdom. It was the one major work of his that went untranslated in his lifetime, while three others were hurried into English for a media campaign conducted on the regime's behalf in Britain. The edition presents it as the earliest systematic account of colonialism as a system rather than a catalogue of abuses, anticipating by well over a century what Césaire, Sartre and Fanon would argue.

In ninety-seven pages Vastey sets out nearly everything he would later develop: an assertion of African origins for civilisation, close readings of European racial science and colonial law, and an unusual alertness to the way European writing itself governs the colonies. Its most extraordinary passage is an inventory of more than a hundred named former colonists and the crimes they committed against the people they owned, his own white grandfather included.

Lundahl's study, first published in 1983, asks why a country as poor as Haiti has an economy that has performed so badly, and answers by setting the question in historical perspective.

Agriculture carries the weight of the analysis. Lundahl examines how farm production is structured, explains why the land yields so little, and shows that farming has failed to provide people with an adequate standard of living. The backwardness of agricultural technology gets its own account.

The political conclusion is blunt: no government since 1820 has taken economic development seriously, because vested interests step in reliably enough to discourage new projects before they get anywhere.

A documentary reader built around primary sources from colonial Saint-Domingue and the revolution that destroyed it. Geggus supplies the editorial introductions and a compact narrative account of the revolt itself, so that the documents arrive with enough context to be read on their own terms.

Much of the material had not appeared in print before. Geggus gathered it from archives on both sides of the Atlantic and translated it for this edition, including sources on the conditions that pushed enslaved people and free people of color toward revolt in 1791.

The volume is pitched at readers meeting the subject for the first time as well as at those already working on it.

Greer examines what ethnicity does politically among Black Americans, distinguishing recent immigrants from those born in the United States.

The evidence comes from a survey she designed for a labour population in New York City, set alongside several national data sources. Her conclusion is that racial and ethnic identity together shape how different Black ethnic groups understand their prospects for advancement and where they place themselves within the American polity.

This bilingual edition gathers the constitutions that governed Haiti and its colonial predecessor across seventy years, with an editorial introduction explaining where each printed text came from and why one version was preferred to another.

The sequence opens with Louverture's constitution of 1801, which formalised a governing structure already in place and made him the colony's sole legitimate voice to Paris; its promulgation brought the Leclerc expedition, and Louverture's death at the Fort de Joux. After independence, Dessalines's charter of 1805 declared an empire, entrenched the abolition of slavery — a clause repeated down to 1849 — barred white men from owning land, refused to name a dominant religion and permitted divorce.

Later documents swing between republic, empire and monarchy while returning to the same questions of citizenship, foreign landholding and religion. All insist on sovereignty, and all reassure foreign powers that Haiti had no intention of exporting its revolution.

Walsh reads Toussaint Louverture and Aime Cesaire together, using their writings to ask how each understood and recounted a defining moment in the decolonizing of the French Caribbean. For Louverture that moment is the revolution that freed the colony of Saint-Domingue; for Cesaire it is the 1946 departmentalization that folded Martinique and other colonies into France itself.

Setting the two side by side lets Walsh trace what connects them. Emancipation left distinct legacies in each case, and those legacies were carried forward in narratives of revolution and nationhood that later generations inherited.

By revisiting both figures through the several layers of narrative they left behind, the book arrives at an account of what it has meant, historically and in the present, to be free and French in the Caribbean.

Haiti occupies a large place in how the western hemisphere is imagined, and the images attached to it pull in opposite directions. Is it a country defined by tyranny, or the site of the only successful slave revolution? Given over to devilish practice, or devoutly religious? Does being the hemisphere's second independent nation give it something to teach about life after colonialism, or is the lesson one of failure?

The essays gathered here come from several disciplines and take up three tasks: assessing Haiti's influence across the hemisphere, placing its successive representations in context, and reading Haitian cultural expression on its own terms.

Getting anywhere, the editors suggest, means first cutting through a thick layer of stereotype: Haiti as the region's low point of poverty, political dysfunction and savagery, and as a dependent unable to govern or provide for itself. The collection aims at accounts adequate to a more complicated history.

Assembled after the 2010 earthquake, this collection interrogates the word new in every promise of a new Haiti. Polyné's introduction argues that the promise has a lineage: reconstruction framed in neoliberal terms restates the imperial development schemes of the 1940s, and functions likewise as an assertion of the Global North's authority over what counts as progress.

Set against that is evidence, drawn partly from ethnography of peasant organisations and their pointed songs, that Haitians have taken up the language of development on their own terms — as a claim to participate in hemispheric affairs, not as deference. Contributors come at it from urban planning and photography, from religion, literature and the study of governance.

Underneath runs the problem of Haiti's fixed place as the region's designated other, which Polyné traces through nineteenth-century European, American, Vatican and Latin American refusals to credit the black republic, and finds again in coverage that measured Haiti's disaster against Chile's.

Aslan sets out to write the life of Jesus of Nazareth as a historian would, against colleagues who hold that the man behind the faith is unrecoverable and that only the Christ of belief is available to study. He concedes the difficulty: the evidence is fragmentary, most of the picture has to be inferred, and Bultmann's warning that scholars keep finding the Jesus they were looking for hangs over the attempt.

His method is to strip the gospels of their theological shaping and set Jesus inside first-century Palestine, in a Judea already sliding toward open revolt against Rome. The book opens not with a nativity but with an assassination, and with the Temple itself — its tiered courts, its money changers, its industrial-scale blood sacrifice and the hereditary priesthood that lived off all of it. The figure who emerges, Aslan grants, will not much resemble the Jesus of modern devotion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur Fournier, a physician, recounts his time in Haiti and above all the period after the earthquake, which the book describes as the largest natural disaster the world has known. He works alongside Haitians dealing with what the quake left behind, and draws from that experience lessons about living and dying, about courage and about endurance.

Much of the book concerns his patients with AIDS and the particular kind of care their illness required. A private family tragedy, disclosed later, returns the narrative to where it began.

The publisher places the result in the company of Camus's The Plague as an account of the human condition.

Landers follows a connected set of African and African-descended lives across the southern mainland of North America and in the Caribbean, roughly 1760 to 1850. Her opening figure is Francisco Menéndez, a Mandinga who passed from British captivity into Spanish service, commanded the Black militia of St. Augustine, led the free town of Mose, petitioned the Spanish king for a captaincy, sailed as a corsair when no answer came, and took his people into Cuban exile when Florida changed hands.

Lives like his, she argues, show enslaved and free people reading the politics around them and acting on what they read. Several empires and many Native nations competed in this arena, and its conflicts kept opening chances to change the course of a life.

Drawing on Spanish-language records not used before, she adds names to a story long carried by a handful of famous voices, and puts flight, marronage and shifting allegiance near the centre of the age of revolutions.

Historians of science have had little to say about France's richest Caribbean possession, and almost nothing has been written in English. McClellan treats that silence as the problem to be solved, and builds his study in three movements.

He begins with the colony itself: how the French settled and organised it, what made its plantations so profitable, and which of its difficulties European expertise was expected to remedy. Without that groundwork, he argues, the scientific story cannot be read properly.

A second part follows the many ways seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and medicine served colonial development, or appeared to. The third traces the Cercle des Philadelphes as an institution: the learned society at Cap Français that Louis XVI raised to royal standing in 1789. A provincial academy in the tropics, on McClellan's account, has more to say about science and empire than its obscurity would suggest.

White asks what the Haitian Revolution did to political thinking in the young United States, and in the process recasts how republicanism and slavery sat together at a founding moment. For Americans after their own revolution, events in Saint-Domingue exposed the gap between professed democratic principle and the practice of slaveholding.

For thirteen years, from 1791 to 1804, enslaved people and free people of color fought for equal rights on French revolutionary terms. Refugees, white and mixed-race, reached American cities, and their arrival made the contradiction concrete: slaveholders in the United States could read their own possible fate in the predicament of Haitian planters.

White gathers reactions across the divisions of the day — Black and white, northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican, proslavery and antislavery. Setting the new republic in a wider Atlantic frame, she shows the refugees' presence provoking some of the earliest arguments about what the nation was.

Anti-Haitian feeling in the Caribbean is usually studied one territory at a time, and Zacair and Reinhardt argue that this is why it remains poorly understood. The Dominican Republic has drawn sustained attention; Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Jamaica and the Bahamas far less, and for French Guiana there is almost nothing in English. Their volume assembles historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and sociologists so that the comparison can finally be made.

The essays examine how host societies imagine Haitian migrants and how migrants absorb those images: a televised campaign of slander in Guadeloupe and the trial that followed, the stereotype of clandestine invasion in French Guiana, Jamaica's retreat from an initially generous response to refugees after Aristide's ouster in 2004, and the competing languages of human rights and humanitarianism in Dominican border clinics.

A second section turns to interviews and first-person accounts, in which Haitians abroad describe that same marginality from the inside.

Girard runs from Columbus's landfall through the sugar colony, independence, the emperors and presidents of the nineteenth century, the American occupation, the Duvaliers and the Aristide years, closing on the earthquake of January 2010 and the relief effort that followed.

The thread through the narrative is deliberately unwelcome. Foreign imperialism, Girard maintains, is not the principal cause of Haitian poverty; bad government and racial antagonism inside the country are, and the habit of blaming outsiders corrodes both enterprise and reform, since nothing one does can matter if everything was decided elsewhere. The earthquake serves as his illustration: unenforced building standards multiplied the dead, and the political class responded by bickering over its own tenure.

He is no gentler about Washington. Two occupations and decades of aid have failed, and the flow of assistance has persuaded too many Haitians that recovery is somebody else's job.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rypson went to Haiti in 2001 to look into Vodou and music and came away with a different subject: the Poloné-Ayisyen, communities at Cazale and elsewhere who trace descent from the Polish legionnaires Napoleon sent to Saint-Domingue. The book is about how that story has been told as much as about what happened.

He works through its layers. There was the furious argument in the press at the time over whether Poles were going over to Dessalines, which the French pressed and the Poles rejected; the memoirs of the few officers who got home; a nineteenth-century Polish historiography preoccupied with foreign betrayal while Poland itself was partitioned; archive-driven studies of the 1910s and 1920s; and the journalists and historians who made the trip to Cazale from the 1950s on. Rypson is careful about which of these can be checked. A set piece is the 1983 papal visit, when the palest villagers were trucked to the airport with Polish flags.

Urban theory has generally cast Johannesburg as a case of irresolvable crisis: a city shaped by unequal economies and segregationist policy, receiving modernity from elsewhere rather than adding anything to it. This collection sets out to write South Africa's largest city into that theory on terms of its own.

The contributors take the classic accounts of metropolitan modernity and test them against what urban life after apartheid is actually like, the experience the volume calls city-ness. What surfaces is a city with many centers and an international reach, carrying a hybrid history that keeps working its way into the present.

Planning built on rigid rationalities and racial separation has been left behind. In its place the essays find intermingling and improvisation, and a distinctly local variety of cosmopolitan culture taking shape.