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.

Shannon sets Price-Mars's formation against the conditions that brought American marines ashore in 1915. Haiti entered the century cut off from the world economy, its elite French in language, religion and schooling, its debt held in Paris, its commerce passing into German and Levantine hands, with foreign businessmen financing the coups that kept turning the presidency over.

The turn in Price-Mars's own thinking came from reading Gustave Le Bon, who sorted human races by psychological traits held to be fixed by heredity and beyond the reach of education. That a people could be written off in advance struck him as an insolence refuted by fourteen years of revolutionary war, and he resolved to answer it.

The occupation supplied the occasion. Shannon follows Caperton's landing and his assumption of governing authority over a country with no institution able to refuse him, then turns to Price-Mars's early efforts to organize Haitians in response.

Social science has spent its energy on formal institutions, Laguerre observes, inheriting from the Enlightenment the conviction that societies improve by being rationally ordered. He proposes reversing the procedure: study the American city from the standpoint of informality and let the formal system be understood from there.

Informal practices in his account are neither marginal nor residual but permanent and structuring, at once peripheral and central to how a city works. Some predate Western formality and survived its imposition through colonization; others exist simply because no formal apparatus can regulate everything.

His material comes largely from the San Francisco Bay Area and Oakland. He shows space being informalized from the supply side, by traders spilling out of premises, and from the demand side, by the customer who turns a street into a mechanic's shop, and he follows firms adopting flexible workplace arrangements until home and office, formal and informal work, blur into each other.

Laguerre treats the Haitian army as an institution that cannot be understood apart from the government it makes and unmakes or the society it polices. Much of the research was done inside the institution, at army headquarters and the military academy in Port-au-Prince, among officers who would shortly find themselves on opposite sides of the 1991 coup against Aristide.

The historical chapters follow the force from the fragmented, regionally based body of the nineteenth century, when the centre kept generals on a short leash precisely to stop them building local followings, through its consolidation into a professional bureaucracy under the American occupation, to the Duvalier years, when infiltration by the militia neutralised the army rather than restructuring it.

A recurring theme is the failure to create a separate civilian police. The army has resisted because policing supplies its income, its contacts with politicians, its cover for corruption, and its capacity to remove a president at will.

Dash reads relations between the two countries as a problem of representation. Borrowing Said's account of how a dominant culture assembles an "Other" out of its own anxieties, he traces how American writing cast Haiti alternately as empty ground for racial regeneration and as proof of African darkness, a pairing organised by nineteenth-century racial theory and by a habit of describing the Caribbean in feminine, submissive terms.

The occupation of 1915 sharpened the pattern. Travel books and sensational journalism sold poisoning, sorcery and cannibalism; a few novelists, Rex Beach among them, tried instead to explain the events politically, though their confidence in what the Marines had achieved was its own distortion.

Haitian writers answered by inverting the terms, adopting the figure of the defiant nèg and the values of the peasantry as weapons against American order. Black American writers of the 1930s, meanwhile, found in Toussaint and Dessalines a usable heroic past.

These essays place Haiti alongside its neighbours rather than treating it as a case apart. Nicholls opens with the region's twentieth-century subordination to Washington, including the occupation-era dogma that what these countries lacked was a middle class, a policy whose beneficiaries included François Duvalier, and the professionalising of local armies that eventually delivered Trujillo and Somoza.

The organising theme is ethnicity. Caste, class and colour in Haiti interlock so intricately that appeals to race usually stand in for economic, regional or personal quarrels: in the peasant risings of the nineteenth century, in the protests of black middle-class Haitians in the 1930s, and in Trinidad's black power movement of 1970, which faltered partly because its leaders never did the slow work of reaching East Indian villagers.

A study of President Salomon tests the noiriste legend of a proletarian black leader against the surviving evidence and finds it largely unsupported.

Scott's account of how slavery ended in Cuba sets aside two familiar explanations: that Spain abolished it from above, or that economic contradictions caused it to be abandoned. Emancipation appears instead as drawn out, incremental, and full of conflict, moving through a run of legal, economic, and social change.

Enslaved people themselves accelerated it. By flight, by legal action, by self-purchase, and by joining the nationalist insurgency, they forced the question and dismantled the institution piece by piece rather than waiting for it to be lifted.

Freedom left former slaves with altered but still narrow economic options. Some responded near the century's end by joining a fresh rebellion against Spanish power, this one ultimately successful. An afterword written for this edition returns to how tangled post-emancipation society was, and to recent shifts in historical method that open such questions to fresh treatment.

Haitian writing, Dash argues, has been held together less by any shared aesthetic creed than by the problem successive generations set themselves: how a small, constantly defamed republic could produce a literature of its own.

The nineteenth-century survey shows patriotic verse curdling into flattery of presidents once the split between Christophe and Petion hardened, then a group of young intellectuals around the papers Le Republicain and L'Union borrowing from French Romanticism to argue, as early as 1836, for writing rooted in local life and in the culture of the peasantry. Movements usually dismissed as imitative, La Ronde above all, are read here as serious answers to the same question rather than as failures of nerve.

The American occupation sharpens everything. Older writers answered the marines with ornate French eloquence as a form of self-defence, while a younger generation turned prosaic and irreverent, and documentary novels by Laleau and Alexis turned on an elite that had accommodated the invaders.

Debien builds his account of slavery in the French Antilles out of paper: notarial minutes, estate inventories, plantation accounts and the private family archives of absentee owners scattered across France and the islands. A long opening survey maps where those documents sit, and notes how thin the French literature of planter manuals is beside its English equivalent.

From that base the study turns to who the enslaved actually were. Working through plantation rolls that record each person's "nation", Debien tracks the shifting African origins of the workforce, and the reputations colonists attached to Senegalese, Bambara, Mandingue, Ibo, Congo and other groups, while cautioning that such labels often described language or port of embarkation rather than descent.

He then follows the newly landed into the estate itself: the branding with an owner's mark that was routine in Saint-Domingue and unusual in Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the disorienting entry into a work routine for which nothing had prepared them.

Madiou follows the war of independence month by month, and largely from the side of the indigenes. The campaigns in the South around Les Cayes and Jeremie, the fighting of the Arcahaie units along the western coast, and the operations of Geffrard, Gerin, Ferou and Dessalines are given in close detail, down to powder smuggled into besieged towns under women's skirts, forced loans levied on white merchants, and truces that opened markets between the two sides.

The narrative is unsparing about atrocity in both directions: Rochambeau's reprisals in the West, prisoners drowned or sold as slaves to Cuba and Porto Rico, a French officer tortured and hanged with a placard on his back.

Madiou also gives room to the fractures within the independence camp. African bands in the North under Petit Noel Pierre and Lamour Derance held aloof from Dessalines, and some of their chiefs treated with the French instead, accepting commissions and opening markets outside Le Cap.

Descourtilz stepped ashore at Port-au-Prince in April 1799 and began, characteristically, by admiring the butterflies. This second volume follows him overland and by coastal sloop through Saint-Domingue, past Arcahaie, Saint-Marc, Gonaives, the Artibonite and Gros-Morne, cataloguing plants, birds, mahogany stands and fruit trees left, he supposes, by providence beside the roads for tired travellers.

Natural history is only half the book. He is an equally busy observer of colonial society: the manners and jealousies of creole women, colonists who compared Le Cap to Paris when its streets were narrow and its buildings graceless, hosts reduced by war to boiled fodder and a chipped saucer of coffee passed around, and Artibonite estates stripped of their splendour by what he calls the revolutionary thunderbolt.

He also turns back to Columbus and the conquest, and says plainly that what Europe carried to these islands was desolation, slavery and death.

Harron's study opens with a definitional question about Haiti's armed groups: is the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies a gang at all? The answer offered is no, and everything else follows from it.

Applying the Terrorism and Extremism Matrix devised by Kelshall and Archutowski, the analysis works through G9's structure, its motives and aims, how much violence it can generate, the justification it gives for that violence, and how openly it operates. On each measure the group sits across categories, drawing on street gangs, on organised crime and on terrorist organisations without reducing to any of them.

Harron proposes a new label, a hybrid type of violent actor, and argues that classifying it correctly has practical consequences: policing and policy tailored to this specific case stand a better chance of containing and disrupting the group than instruments designed for gangs.