Bloch opens by asking where the word itself came from. 'Feudal' began as lawyers' jargon for whatever pertained to a fief; it was Boulainvilliers, and after him Montesquieu, who stretched it to name a whole state of society, and the revolutionary decree abolishing the feudal regime fixed it in the languages of Europe for good.

He thinks the label badly chosen. Not every manor was a fief, not every fief a principality, and no complex social order is well described by singling out one form of property right. But worn coins still circulate, and the historian may use the term so long as he defines what he means by it.

The inquiry is deliberately bounded: western and central Europe, the mid-ninth century through to the opening decades of the thirteenth. Whether societies elsewhere deserve the name is postponed to the end of the book.

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

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

Trouillot's case is the Commonwealth of Dominica, a marginal banana exporter, and his first claim is historical. Caribbean peasantries did not precede capitalism and were not disrupted by it. They came after the plantation, made up of people carried across the Atlantic by merchant capital, working crops brought from other continents. Tradition arrived after modernity; the rupture other theories treat as their endpoint is where analysis has to begin.

His second claim is conceptual. Political economy has dissolved the peasantry into simple commodity production, but what people actually do matters — whether they work on land or at sea, what they can grow, how a household divides its tasks. Banana growers, fishermen and seamstresses may all sell commodities while living differently, not least in how gender inequality takes shape among them.

He is wary too of the unit itself. Columbus named Dominica from a passing ship; the island as an object of study still has to be discovered, not assumed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Hunt follows the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution through the antebellum United States and finds them less in policy than in imagination. Proslavery writers assigned Haiti to a tropical belt they thought naturally suited to black people; abolitionists borrowed the imagery of the Spanish black legend to render the slave South a place of cruelty and licence, with French, Catholic, sugar-growing Louisiana as its most lurid emblem. Melville and Faulkner both worked obliquely with the same association.

Some of the influence travelled with people. Refugees from Saint-Domingue settled across the Lower South, apprenticed their children, sued for freedom on the strength of the French abolition, opened academies in New Orleans and Natchez, and founded the French-language newspapers that kept Creole identity alive until after the Civil War.

Hunt also traces the alarm the revolution spread around the Caribbean and Spanish America, where Bolivar rebuilt his faltering movement under Petion's protection.

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

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

The organizing premise here treats a family the way analysts treat a firm: it reads its situation, weighs options, and acts on whatever looks like the most efficient route to producing and reproducing its own survival. Fass sets that premise against ten years of material gathered in Port-au-Prince homes, markets, and streets.

What follows is a close account of how relatives earn a living, share out what they have both inside a household and beyond it, convert food and water into life and labor, obtain shelter and schooling, and borrow to pay for all of it. These strands interlock: move one and the rest move.

Aid programs in credit, housing, schooling, health, and jobs often prove beside the point, Fass argues, because the concepts steering them misread how the urban poor actually live. He avoids easy criticism, noting that ideas do shift when new knowledge arrives — only slowly, at a price the poor are the ones to pay.

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

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

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

Written in numbered paragraphs, Lyotard's book concerns a conflict that no court can resolve. A litigation can be judged because the parties share an idiom; a differend arises where the injury one party has suffered cannot be phrased in the language the tribunal accepts, so that the injured are stripped not only of redress but of the standing to testify.

The trap recurs throughout: prove the harm and it was mere damage, fail to prove it and the claim collapses. Denial of the gas chambers, the old paradox of Protagoras and his pupil, and the worker who can appear before the law only as the proprietor of labor-power are each read as versions of it.

What is required, then, is a new way of forming phrases and joining them. Lyotard assigns literature, philosophy and perhaps politics the task of inventing idioms in which the unphrasable can be put into phrases.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Laguerre traces Haitian migration to New York from the beginning of the Duvalier era, when repression and a shrinking economy pushed mainly upper- and middle-class Haitians abroad, through the boat arrivals that began in 1972 and turned detention policy into a national argument. He notes the contrast with Cubans, received as refugees with federal support, and its consequences for undocumented Haitians who avoid public hospitals for fear of exposure and rely instead on folk remedies or Haitian-staffed clinics.

The book rests on fieldwork carried out in Haiti during the mid-1970s and in New York in 1977 and 1978. It works outward from the conditions that determine who leaves — household strategies, the pull of Port-au-Prince, the travel agent as broker — to the community that resulted: its Manhattan and Brooklyn blocks, its churches and Creole-language publications, its households and the strain between parents and children socialised in different worlds, and its portrayal in the American press.

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.

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.

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.

Fouchard's subject is Saint-Domingue, the wealthiest colony any European power held in the Americas, from its earliest decades through the closing years of the eighteenth century, where his attention tightens.

At the center are fugitives from the plantations, maroons of both sexes, and leaders whose names have gone largely uncelebrated: Boukman, Macandal, Polydor. Through cunning, persistence and bloody sacrifice, Fouchard argues, they made the founding of the Haitian republic possible.

The story unfolds against the routine of enslaved life and the political currents running between the colony and Europe.

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.

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.

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.