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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Niles writes as a traveller, not a historian. The book opens in a New York elevator run by a sea captain temporarily without a ship, whose talk of small ports sends the author south, and then proceeds as a sequence of sketches: a Sunday cockfight where the birds arrive cradled against their owners' chests, market women selling tobacco, rum and plantains under the trees, a drunk gendarme reading a Dumas novel, a prisoner made to drum, a ruined palace and the great walls of the Citadel.

Colour is never far from the surface. Niles dwells on the Dumas ancestry and on the many children of French fathers and African mothers, and lets a guide explain how a lost election once sent him into the hills until the new president forgot who had opposed him.

Published during the American occupation and illustrated with photographs, the book is after atmosphere: light, noise, fear, laughter.

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

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

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

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.

Candler, an English Quaker, coasted Haiti in 1839 on a missionary voyage to Jamaica and later travelled through the country. What struck him first was emptiness: mountains and shoreline running for hundreds of miles with no house, no field and no one in sight, a prospect he found grand and depressing at once.

Inland he found something else. He rides through villages, is fed by strangers, notes cane land gone back to pasture, and describes the coffee trade, the schools, the priests, the gaols and the army. Where Europeans charged Dessalines and Christophe with barbarity, he answers with Leclerc and Rochambeau drowning ironed prisoners in the bay off Cap Haïtien, and asks who was crueller.

His verdict is sympathetic but unsparing. Serious crime is rare and travellers safe; what holds the republic back, he argues, is ignorance, a clergy content to keep it so, and a military system that breeds petty vice.

Candler, an English Friend, travelled through Haiti at the beginning of 1841 and set his observations down for an abolitionist readership at home. He notes the long river that floats mahogany to the sea, the lakes and mineral springs, the ore left in the ground for want of capital, and the closed custom-house at Cap Haitien on the anniversary of independence.

There are no inns of the European sort, so travellers lodge as guests; he stays with a widow running a shop on the waterfront, and later takes rooms in the capital where merchants, planters and priests come to table. He calls on the country's principal ecclesiastic, who describes the church's revenues as thin.

Riding inland he finds pasture and provision grounds where cane once grew, and villages still ruined by bombardment. Passing the bay where Leclerc's and Rochambeau's men drowned their prisoners, he asks who has the better claim to charge the other with cruelty.

Writing from Christophe's kingdom against the French colonial party and its correspondents at home, Vastey explains both why Haitians freed themselves and why they afterward turned on one another. He begins with a complaint about the record: no general account of Haiti has been written by a Haitian, and the European fragments that exist were assembled from planters' testimony and carry its prejudice.

His central claim is that the internal wars were manufactured abroad. Hedouville, he argues, came with secret instructions to divide Toussaint Louverture from Rigaud, and having failed with the first flattered the second into accepting a command he had no right to hold; the later conflict under Petion was that war's aftershock. Both generals, on this account, were tools of a France unable to restore slavery by force.

The polemic is aimed as much at writers in the republic - Colombel and Milcent are named again and again - as at Paris.

The body of law promulgated for Henry Christophe's kingdom in northern Haiti, presented to the king by his Privy Council with a dedicatory address that is itself part of the argument.

That address casts codification as an act of civilizational self-assertion. The council claims that no page of history offers a precedent for what has been done for the Haitian people, and that drafting these laws meant erasing the last vestiges of a system the nation has repudiated for good. Existing law is described as a patchwork of old edicts and ordinances, obscure enough to leave magistrates without authority and citizens without recourse.

What follows is a civil code together with laws of commerce, of prizes taken at sea, of civil and criminal procedure, of correctional and criminal police, of cultivation and of the military. The agricultural laws carry particular weight: the council presents the rural cultivator as the largest part of the population and farming as the state's foundation.

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.

Swanson introduces and prints for the first time two letters of 1816 by Stephen Grellet, a Limoges nobleman's son who fled the French Revolution, lost his religion in Demerara, and became a Quaker minister in the United States. Addressed to William Allen and George Stacey, they describe three months spent travelling in Petion's southern republic.

The introduction sets the trip in its Atlantic context: a Black state whose victory had hardened proslavery opinion abroad, an island split between a kingdom in the north and a republic in the south, and an abolitionist movement then under sustained attack. Grellet says almost nothing of that internal conflict. He judged Haitians favourably, blamed what offended him on French irreligion and on the local clergy, and held that instruction and material help would make the country exemplary.

Swanson argues that the letters, passed over by the nineteenth-century biographies built from Grellet's now-lost journal, show something the journal cannot.

Haiti is the one post-emancipation society where the enslaved freed themselves by arms and took the state along with their freedom. Sheller asks what control and resistance could look like under those conditions, once colour and class still divided former planters from the field labourers who had risen through the revolutionary army.

Her title comes from a peasant retort to anyone enforcing a labour contract: the signature binds nothing if the signer can walk away. Sheller reads it as an embodied tactic, continuous with pre-independence flight from the plantation, and finds its cumulative effect in the collapse of large-scale agriculture across the nineteenth century, as land passed to veterans by military rank and estates broke up.

She frames the inquiry with Trouillot's argument that the revolution was unthinkable to contemporaries and remains marginal to accounts of modernity, then asks how much of the peasantry's own history the archive has silenced.

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

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

Zeuske asks how far the French Revolution actually registered in Spain's American colonies, and answers mostly in the negative. Reading Alexander von Humboldt's travel diaries against the books he later built from them, he shows that Humboldt expected no Creole revolution, anticipated instead a white republic that would keep slavery intact, and referred to France chiefly in connection with the Enlightenment or Napoleonic politics.

What officials and Creole elites genuinely feared was Saint-Domingue. That fear shaped policy: the expulsion of French residents, bans on importing slaves from the French islands, and a habit of labelling every conspiracy French whatever its real sources. Venezuela, Santo Domingo, Cuba and Puerto Rico each absorbed the shock differently, through refugees, black auxiliary troops fighting for Spain, and planters who hired Saint-Domingue managers to build new sugar and coffee economies.

Independence, when it came, is treated here as a shallow social revolution that left caste hierarchy and slavery largely standing.

Popkin's opening chapter is mostly an argument about what the events of 1791 to 1804 were not. The phrase Haitian Revolution places them beside the American and French revolutions, but it also implies a coherence they lacked: the slave insurrection broke out in one of three provinces and ran alongside a separate rising of free people of colour with quite different aims, frequently in conflict with it.

Toussaint Louverture fits the revolutionary mould no better. Whether he had any hand in starting the 1791 revolt remains unclear, he rejected the first French emancipation decree, and the labour laws he imposed drove many blacks to take up arms against him.

The consequences were nonetheless global, from Britain's prohibition of the slave trade in 1807 to a European turn toward colonies in Africa itself, in a country whose settlement only became legible decades after independence.

Thornton sets out to unsettle a collective memory of the Americas that still runs in one direction, from Europe outward. His remedy is Atlantic history practised less as heritage-keeping or moral judgement than as social science: societies are set beside one another because the comparison is analytically useful, not because one of them is ours.

The opening pages take up early European voyaging, then treat Europe, Africa and the American continents in turn, comparing political forms as far apart as those of the Iroquois and the Tupi. A middle section sorts expansion into three kinds of encounter, conquest, colonization and contact, which lets in regions normally dropped from such accounts: the American West, the western Caribbean, Atlantic Africa itself, places where Europeans arrived as guests or were thrown out.

Culture comes late and stays comparative, taking up the survival and loss of languages, virtuosity in aesthetic forms, and revelation in religion.

Berry studies accusations of poisoning across the slave societies of the Atlantic, assembling a body of more than five hundred cases from Bahia, the Dutch Guianas, Virginia and Martinique and reading them alongside one another rather than colony by colony. The comparison brings out what no single archive shows: statutes written under very different regimes, and the prosecutions mounted under them, rose and subsided along strikingly similar curves through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

An opening chapter uses reconstructed African root words together with European philology to follow how notions of poison, healing and sorcery shifted on both sides of the ocean before people carried them west. The remaining chapters change vantage point in turn: slaveholders and officials, who read poisoning as a seizure of their authority; the enslaved, who sought out healers of African descent and sometimes set investigations against those same healers in motion; and the practitioners themselves, valued and feared for what they knew.

Dayan returns to Haiti's past to trace how one place came to carry pride and contempt at once. The essay settles on 1889, when Frederick Douglass took up the post of minister resident and consul general to the government of Louis Florvil Hyppolite, and on the American push to obtain the Mole St. Nicholas.

Douglass's own account, set down in the closing chapters of Life and Times, supplies much of the material. There he casts the Americans pressing the claim as men after money regardless of what it cost others in life and misery, calling them sharks and pirates. Dayan sets that judgment beside the "badge of servitude," a mark its holders found far too useful to give up.

The terms of that stigma, the essay contends, underwrote and continue to sustain the arrangements that keep paired opposites such as civility and brutality in working order, and that fix the rules for a modern idea of servility.

Richman follows Haitian migrants in South Florida who arrived Catholic and have since joined evangelical Protestant congregations, and asks what conversion does for them. It supplies, she argues, both a usable script for individual advancement in the United States and an exit from the thick obligations — to kin, to the lwa, to ritual work back home — that transnational life would otherwise enforce. Pastors give converts the means to shrug off the unseen penalties that make those obligations stick.

The break is less clean than separatist Protestantism claims. Under the ascetic style, Richman finds the imagery of sudden money and private ambition that properly belongs to sorcery, and some Haitians say so openly, naming the pastors as sorcerers themselves and unusually effective ones. Catholicism, Vodou and Protestantism, on this account, define and reproduce one another across one religious field that runs from Léogâne to the diaspora.

Snelgrave, an English slaving captain who worked the Guinea coast in the first decades of the eighteenth century, sets down what he saw there for readers at home and, pointedly, for the London merchants he addresses in his dedication.

The longest section recounts the Dahomean king's overthrow of the kingdom of Whydah and the author's own journey inland to the victor's camp, where captives were put to death in ceremonies he describes at length. Other parts explain how Africans came to be sold into bondage, count the numbers shipped annually to America, and describe revolts aboard the ships he commanded; a further narrative tells of his capture by pirates in 1719. His preface anticipates disbelief, citing witnesses then living in London who could confirm the sacrifices and the cannibalism he reports.

The shorter sections began as an answer to a friend who doubted whether the trade was lawful. Snelgrave defends it, then leaves the reader to judge.

Holly delivered this address to a literary society of young colored men in New Haven in 1855, after returning from Haiti, and repeated it through Ohio, Michigan and Canada West before it was printed. Its declared object is to defend the inherent capability of people of African descent to govern themselves and to build a civilization.

His evidence is Haitian history from the revolution onward. The defense is needed, he argues, not only against open contempt: many who profess to be friends of the race carry a private doubt about equality that surfaces the moment full recognition is pressed on them, and their reticence leaves the field to detractors until the oppressed half accept the verdict themselves.

The lecture then works through the events leading to the rising, the composure of the blacks under it as proof of fitness to govern, the intervention of free men of color, and the record of national enterprise and governmental stability since independence.

Settling Black Americans somewhere outside the United States was a respectable proposal for most of the nineteenth century, entertained by presidents from Jefferson onward and resting on the assumption that Black people could never take an equal place in a white society. Lincoln inherited the idea and acted on it.

Lockett reconstructs what happened when it was tried. Bernard Kock, a promoter from Charleston, talked Geffrard's government into a long lease on Île à Vache, then talked Washington into sending settlers there on the strength of glowing descriptions. Roughly 450 formerly enslaved people sailed on the Ocean Ranger in April 1863.

The island was not what Kock had advertised. Agents sent to inspect the colony reported people still in the Union uniforms they had arrived in, saying they had been deceived and asking to be taken home. By January 1864 conditions were declared a disaster, the managers had abandoned the place, and the survivors were brought back.

Thornton sets out to correct an imbalance in Atlantic history, where the crossing of Europeans has drawn far more attention than the larger African migration that accompanied it. Working outward from Braudel's idea of a region defined by its sea, he treats Africa not as a passive supplier but as a set of societies whose rulers and merchants set the terms of contact.

The first half examines commerce, warfare and politics on the African coast. European goods, Thornton concludes, were largely luxuries that neither displaced local industry nor made Atlantic trade necessary to African prosperity, and Europeans lacked the military strength to compel any exchange, including the traffic in captives. Slavery was already embedded in African legal and political life, which allowed elites to push its costs onto poorer neighbours.

The second half turns to the Americas, arguing that transplanted Africans had room enough to shape religion, revolt, language and maroon settlement, often extending changes that had begun at home.

Laguerre separates folk medical knowledge from the cosmopolitan medicine of hospitals and journals largely by how each is stored and passed on. Written knowledge accumulates, crosses borders and survives unaltered; oral knowledge belongs to a family or a locality, changes a little with every telling, and vanishes once the need it answered has gone.

Much of the book sorts the Afro-Caribbean repertoire into kinds: cures credited to a named discoverer or to a spirit who learned healing at the world's beginning, remedies that work by symbolic likeness, such as red food and drink for weak blood, and the division between what anyone may learn and what is inherited within cult groups and disclosed in dreams.

He then follows these traditions through the plantation, where the enslaved community's medical knowledge is treated as a collective memory reassembled under duress, and onward through Asian indenture and black migration to northern American cities, each encounter yielding fresh syncretism.

Haiti is the Caribbean's oldest independent state and, in Lewis's account, one of its most awkwardly placed members. Admired for the revolution that founded it and kept at arm's length for the political turmoil that followed, the country was the last to enter CARICOM, joining only in 1997.

That double attitude, Lewis argues, has produced regional policy toward Haiti that pulls in two directions at once. The clearest case is CARICOM's handling of the February 2004 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the period that followed.

The paper asks why the relationship stays so unsettled despite Haiti's weight in the region. It works through the historical roots of Haiti's ties to CARICOM and through the ways member governments have responded to successive Haitian crises, with particular attention to the post-Aristide years. Lewis concludes that goodwill has existed on both sides, but that much of what regional cooperation with Haiti promised has not been delivered.

A systematic description of Dahomean religion, arranged as its practitioners arrange it, by pantheon. Mawu heads the account as parent of the gods and the source of their power, the one who holds the formulae for making people and things and who sent divination down so that human beings might learn to deflect the anger of the ruling deities. The Sky pantheon is treated first, then the Earth pantheon, each with its priests, its initiates and its ceremonies.

Alongside the great gods stands the cult of the deified ancestors, built on the clan founders known as Tohwiyo and reaching into food prohibitions and the rites for the royal dead. A later section takes up magic and the semi-divine beings of the forest who connect it to the gods — Minona, the goddess of twins, the children said to be born to die and return. Serpent worship is examined and the charge of a phallic cult set aside.

Anglade treats Haitian territory as something produced rather than given. Two processes, he argues, made the society and its space together: the formation of a market with its catchments, crossroads and connections, and the exercise of power through the carving up of territory and the planting of a graded set of institutions for control and conditioning.

He periodises this in three moments. Colonial fragmentation extended Europe overseas under a trade pact; the nineteenth century regionalised the Americas around strongmen, landowners and provincial wars; the twentieth welded regional markets into national ones and produced a capital that operates as a republic inside the republic. Emigration, he adds, now obliges anyone thinking about national space to include the diaspora in the hierarchy of centres.

The regional chapters take the argument into detail, counting sugar works, indigo works, cotton and coffee estates plain by plain and reading density against irrigation, wind and altitude.

Ibrahim collects and extends his work on continental African newcomers to Canada and the United States, a group he says immigration research has largely passed over. His organising claim is that nobody is born Black: Blackness is performed daily through speech, dress and bearing, and immigrants become Black through a process that ties their sense of themselves to non-immigrant Black populations.

Language carries much of the argument. Learning Black English, treated here as a second language, is inseparable from that becoming, and hip-hop functions as a curriculum schools decline to teach while young people invest in it heavily.

Other chapters borrow from Deleuze and Guattari to insist that Blackness is multidirectional rather than uniform, use Derrida to propose unconditional hospitality as a model for how teachers should receive students, and reconsider research ethics in immigrant communities, arguing that fieldwork should humanise rather than extract.

Wynter's manuscript opens by refusing the terms of an old quarrel. Where Herskovits and Frazier disputed how much culture enslaved Africans had kept or lost, she treats the premise itself - the myth of a cultural void - as an instrument of domination: literacy was made the measure of being human, Christian theology recast other peoples' gods as demons, and to be outside Europe became to be outside humanity.

She names the resulting ideology after Sepulveda and insists on its material function, the theologian having been retained by colonists defending their claim on Indian labor. An argument drawn from theories of unequal exchange follows: because the enslaved were a workforce forbidden to move, the bundle of goods keeping them alive stayed fixed while wages rose elsewhere.

Against this she sets indigenization, whereby exiles remade a homeland - Africa surviving as the living country of ancestors one might join - with revolt and marronnage at its center.

Mbembe writes from the conviction that the planet has entered an age of combustion, its resources, atmosphere, water and food visibly degrading while public discourse fills with predictions of collapse. He is unsatisfied with that mood, noting that many peoples have long had to make life out of ruin, and that withdrawal and the hardening of borders are themselves political postures.

Brutalism is his name for a form of power admitting no outside and no exit. It binds together economic calculation, digital computation and the biological sciences on the premise that living beings and machines are no longer distinguishable, humanity turning artificial as objects and machines take on life.

Against this he sets a demand for planetary consciousness and for a refounded human community standing in solidarity with everything alive, arguing after Fanon that genuine struggle begins as reparation, with the repair of what has been broken.

Johnson reads the Haitian anthropologist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain's work on burial customs and kinship in the rural town of Kenscoff as a source for the history of women's rights organizing in the wake of the American occupation of 1915 to 1934.

Two bodies of material sit side by side: Comhaire-Sylvain's field notes from 1937 and 1938, along with unpublished writing on family cemeteries and ceremonies, and the essays she published in La Voix des Femmes, a feminist periodical of the interwar decades. Moving through the space of the dead, at once tactile and fleeting, she worked out the commitments of an emerging Haitian feminism.

Mourning and political organizing are treated as comparable settings, both places where culture and the meanings attached to gender are made and remade. Comhaire-Sylvain's research itself becomes a form of public mourning, and a way into the intellectual life of elite Haitian women early in the twentieth century.

Patte's dictionary answers the question of what Christianity is not through an entry under that heading but through the whole of its three and a half thousand articles. Its working definition is deliberately wide: anyone claiming to follow Jesus Christ counts, which admits Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Anglicans alongside the fast-growing independent and charismatic churches and the groups usually filed as marginal.

No tradition serves as the benchmark. The volume avoids calling anyone a saint except where the word belongs to an institution's name or is plainly flagged as one church's judgement, and it uses the label heretic only where it is clear who is applying it.

Behind these choices lies an editorial commitment, argued by way of Spivak, neither to speak to nor to speak for believers in other cultural settings. Contributors present their own traditions; the historical coverage is anchored in a cluster of survey articles on world Christianity.

Gathered here are two monographs and the remains of a longer work by a Roman senator turned historian, whose own career shapes the disenchantment of the writing: expulsion from the senate, service under Caesar, a governorship in Africa, and charges of extortion on his return.

The first monograph treats the conspiracy of 63 BCE, a subject Cicero had already worked hard to keep before the public. Sallust offers another vantage, presenting Catiline as the sharpest symptom of a republic corroded by luxury, greed and ambition, and tracing that decay back well beyond the plot itself. The second turns to the war fought in Numidia late in the second century, where the king begins as a young man of promise and is spoilt by contact with a Rome in which everything had its price, and where the arrogance of the nobility meets its first real challenge.

The Histories, covering the years between, survive only in fragments, speeches and letters.

The revolution in Saint-Domingue reorganised mainland politics long before the Civil War settled anything, Horne argues, and the reorganisation ran through the people who fled it. Refugees carried their terror to North America and were absorbed into the slaveholding republic as useful allies: Judah P. Benjamin's father-in-law, who lectured audiences on African treachery, or Louis Tousard, who helped establish West Point after trying to suppress the 1791 revolt.

Haiti's existence sharpened an existential choice for slaveholders between retreating from slavery and risking everything, while arriving Frenchmen were courted as a demographic counterweight to the enslaved. Spain, Britain and the United States all watched Hispaniola nervously, and Grant's push to annex the Dominican Republic closed in 1871 a cycle that had opened in 1791.

A second thread follows the island's pull on mainland Africans, enslaved and free, for whom Haiti was a destination and an argument rather than a warning.

Allman surveys how couples in Haiti form unions and why comparatively few Haitian women are legally married. Historical and present-day pressures behind that pattern are reviewed first, followed by a scheme for sorting Haitian unions into categories that carry cultural meaning rather than imported ones.

The evidence comes mainly from the 1977 Haiti Fertility Survey, together with its pretest. Allman examines what kind of union people are in and how old they were entering their first, along with the background characteristics associated with each.

Union patterns are then treated as something in motion, with figures on how many unions and partners people have and how often plural unions occur, set out for towns and for the countryside. Norms governing sexual behaviour come in for discussion, and the paper closes by weighing what the findings suggest for later research.

Sheller's subject is the long habit of consuming the Caribbean, its sugar and its scenery, its bodies, its images, and by now its literature and theory. Her claim is that the practices that carried goods out of the islands under slavery never stopped, but changed shape.

She declines a purely geographical definition of the region, treating it instead as an effect and a set of practices as much as a place, denaturalized and renaturalized as paradise through maps, voyage accounts, botanical collecting and later through tourism and area studies. Travel writing is accordingly a central archive, read alongside the careers of the objects that crossed the Atlantic.

Chapters follow shifting views of Caribbean nature, the openness and vulnerability of the region's economies, its use for medical testing and pharmaceutical development, and the metropolitan academy's appetite for Caribbean writing. The argument is tied to the reparations debate that followed the Durban conference of 2001.

A collection of Haitian folktales taken down from named tellers and printed in Creole with English translations alongside, so that the language of the telling survives with the story.

The tales turn on jealous brothers and a murdered sister, on a bone that sings its accusation as each member of the family walks past, on a disagreeable old woman in the woods outwitted by a boy who sings about fleas until she opens her door. Songs run through them, some with their melodies transcribed, and the collector marks which ones are sung in French dialect rather than Creole.

The footnotes carry the ethnography. They name the tellers and where they lived, gloss idioms word for word, explain terms such as the cooperative kumbit work party, and record honestly when an informant could not say what a word meant. Each tale closes with comparative references to versions in the Dominican Republic, Louisiana, the Lesser Antilles, Jamaica, Egypt, Algeria and further afield.

After the earthquake of January 2010, the plans drawn up for Haiti's recovery leaned heavily on garment assembly and on expanding the country's export processing zones. Edwards asks whose interests that answer served.

His argument turns on a split inside American business. Textile mills, long protectionist, had used trade preference schemes to keep Haiti as a captive offshore sewing floor supplied with US cloth. Apparel firms organised around global sourcing wanted something looser. Tracing the trade legislation passed in response to a sequence of Haitian disasters, he shows authority moving steadily from the first bloc to the second.

The earthquake, on this reading, functioned as an opening rather than an interruption: a moment when Haiti's place in the apparel commodity chain could be rewritten. What emerged was not development but a redefined position inside a network of low-wage assembly work that can be moved wherever it is cheapest, with the country's poverty as the attraction.

Hallward begins from a discrepancy. The 1991 coup against Aristide drew international condemnation and a campaign for his restoration; the coup that removed him again in February 2004 met resignation, indifference, or approval. In the interval a president twice elected by landslide had been rewritten in mainstream commentary as corrupt, aloof and hostile to rights, so that his removal could be presented as a service to Haitian democracy.

The book reconstructs how that was accomplished: sustained misrepresentation in the press, foreign-funded democracy promotion aimed at manufacturing an opposition, and finally armed intervention with American and French backing. Hallward rates it the most effective piece of neo-imperial subversion since the defeat of the Sandinistas, and the more so for scarcely registering as a coup at all.

He also weighs what Lavalas managed and where it failed, setting the movement's emergence in the 1980s against the Duvaliers, the Macoutes, and an elite structurally insulated from the poor majority.

A magistrate of the colonial courts, Moreau de Saint-Mery spent years assembling material for a parish-by-parish account of the French half of Hispaniola, printed at Philadelphia in 1797 during his exile. No other French colony, and few provinces of the kingdom, received anything comparable.

The survey takes in terrain, population, history, farming, manufacture and craft, social and intellectual life, entertainments and meeting places, and the administrative, judicial and charitable institutions of the colony. Its accounts of the towns and settlements are a first-rate source for colonial urbanism, and the pages on hospitals are unusually full.

It also documents its author's mind. Moreau sorts the colony's inhabitants into an elaborate ladder of complexions between white and black, treats those gradations as fixed by nature, and hangs on them judgements about character, idleness, courage and fitness for particular kinds of work. The line he draws between white ancestry and every other, he writes, runs on to infinity.

Wood follows Jean-Jacques Dessalines from his service as one of Toussaint Louverture's generals to the throne of an independent Haiti. The account opens with Leclerc's expedition of 1801, the wave of defections that came once word spread that Napoleon meant to restore slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique, and the campaign that ended in Rochambeau's capitulation and the proclamation at Gonaives on the first day of 1804.

The portrait that follows is not admiring. Illiterate, despotic and feared, Dessalines governed a country kept permanently on a war footing, maintained an army that absorbed much of the eligible male population, and sorted every citizen into soldier or laborer under a regime of compulsory field work. He annulled colonial-era land transfers to free people of color and ordered titles reverified, embittering black and mixed-race proprietors alike. Crowned Jacques I late in 1804, he was killed two years later.

Bourdieu's material is a French survey of 1,217 people carried out in 1963 and 1967-68, asking what respondents liked in painting, music, furniture, clothing and cooking, and what they knew about each.

Two findings organise everything that follows: cultural practice tracks educational qualification first and father's occupation second, and the same social logic runs through the whole range of preferences, so that a taste in art predicts a taste in food. The concepts built on this — cultural capital as an inheritable asset convertible into money and position, habitus as the unifying principle behind a group's preferences, the field of legitimating institutions that decides what counts as art — dissolve the separation between class and status that sociology had inherited.

The argument is aimed squarely at the philosophical tradition that treats aesthetic judgement as disinterested. There is no standing outside the game, Bourdieu insists; the sociologist is in it too, and must say so.

Dash follows Glissant from the early poetry through the novels to the theoretical essays, treating them as one continuous project. Glissant emerges as a writer who declines two temptations at once: the bleak verdict that Caribbean communities are cultural wrecks, and the search for untouched origins that would fix identity in a pure past.

The refusal shapes even the biography. Dash notes how little Glissant discloses about his beginnings in the hill commune of Sainte-Marie, and reads his suspicion of founding fathers — Schoelcher, the maroon progenitor, Columbus, Césaire himself — as part of a diagnosis of dependency in the French departments. What autobiography there is has been dispersed into characters such as Mathieu and Mycéa.

Chapters on the early collections and Les Indes, then on La Lézarde and Le quatrième siècle, show landscape used not as a settled belonging but as movement: mountain against sea, the river descending to the plain.

What stands here is the general introduction Manigat wrote for the last two volumes of his series, given over to Haitian diplomacy and international relations from Toussaint Louverture to the present. He calls it an examination of conscience of a history and of a historian, and it doubles as a critical autobiography written in the spirit of the Annales and of a history meant to be living rather than antiquarian.

The life carries the argument. A schooling in Haitian and Catholic tradition, study in Paris, a quarter-century of political exile and finally the constitutional presidency of 1988, ended after five months by the army, are set against the country's own sequence: the Caribbean as inseparable from Haitian identity, independence as the ground of haitianite, several distinct revolutions in 1946, an intellectual spring frozen by Duvalier, and two populisms that each failed.

Manigat offers the pages as material for younger readers to argue with.

Jackson follows the Haitian teachers, doctors and engineers recruited into the United Nations civilian operation in Congo after independence from Belgium. Haiti supplied one of the largest national contingents in the mission, and Haitians held senior posts in UNESCO's Africa division, the WHO medical team and, by 1963, the ONUC military command.

The research pairs interviews conducted in Montreal, Paris, New York and Port-au-Prince with archival records in Kinshasa, in Haiti and at United Nations headquarters. Raoul Peck, whose father went out with the first contingent, is among the informants; against the assumption that these migrants lived as privileged expatriates, he recalls a first year without a car, riding the same crowded buses as Congolese workers. Andree Blouin's memoir gives the contrary view, of Haitians arriving by way of Papa Doc and blending in too easily.

He uses that tension to question both the picture of Haitian migrants as destitute refugees and the reading of international organizations as neo-colonial machinery.

Jung reads Haitian fiction and poetry written between 1968 and 2010 for what it reveals about manhood under authoritarian rule. Works by Marie Vieux Chauvet, Rene Depestre, Franketienne and others supply the evidence.

The historical anchor is the Duvalier period. From 1957 to 1986 Francois and then Jean-Claude Duvalier governed through fear and terror, and Jung contends that this apparatus generated its own dominant model of manhood, built on domination and sustained by pushing rival versions of masculinity to the margins. The regime, on this reading, fed on the very people it depended upon, an appetite Jung describes as self-devouring.

The larger question is whether repression that severe can produce other ways of being a man. Literature written under and about the dictatorship, Jung argues, does more than talk back to the official script; it also opens ground on which the period's damage can be worked through.

Prompted by Laurent Dubois's argument that the Haitian Revolution has been undervalued because the enslaved left so few written sources, Johnson asks what that means for the world history survey course.

Her answer rests on a survey of the textbooks. Most now mention Haiti, often filed with the Latin American independence movements or attached to France, and some name Boukman, Ogé and Dessalines. Africa is largely absent: the enslaved appear stripped of the political and military traditions they carried across the Atlantic, and few textbook authors are Africanists. She also flags the routine misuse of "mulatto" for the whole free population of colour.

Earlier pieces by Peguero, Garrigus and Sepinwall get their due, but Johnson wants more than a slot on the syllabus. Teaching the revolution well, she argues, means showing both what the world did to Haiti and what Haiti did to the world — and choosing a textbook whose own apparatus can carry part of that load.

Childs reconstructs the decade in which several thousand French exiles made temporary homes in American cities, and begins by separating two very different movements. The voluntary emigration of 1789 he treats harshly, as the flight of privileged men who did their own cause no good abroad. The far larger departure after 1791 he treats sympathetically: reforming nobles, bourgeois, priests alienated by the Civil Constitution, and officers still loyal to France, most of whom left because remaining meant prison or the scaffold. Almost all who reached the United States came from this second group.

A separate stream came from the Caribbean. Childs narrates the quarrel between Galbaud and the civil commissioners at Le Cap in June 1793, the burning of the town, and the overloaded fleet that carried some ten thousand refugees to the Chesapeake.

He then follows the exiles ashore, from the Orleans princes making their way to New Orleans to obscurer emigres waiting on news from home.

Three concerns organize Bongie's book: the consolidation of francophone postcolonial studies into a field over the preceding decade and its uneasy relation to literary study; the recent turn in postcolonial theory away from culture and back toward the properly political; and the insistence, in France and its Caribbean departments, on a duty to remember discharged through commemoration.

He takes seriously the charge that the field has been politically weightless and has averted its eyes from its own place in a global market for postcolonial writing, treating Hallward's dismissal as a hypothesis worth pursuing to the end. On memory he stays deliberately divided, skeptical of remembrance organized as a governmental imperative yet unwilling to pretend that something purer is available.

Its historical center is the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath — the country split between Pétion in the south and Christophe in the north after Dessalines was killed — read as a test of whether taking sides remains possible.

A single-volume account of American foreign relations from the Revolution onward, tracing how a scattering of coastal colonies hemmed in by hostile neighbors and rival empires became the dominant power in world politics, and how that ascent was understood by the people who managed it.

The organizing claim is that foreign policy has never been peripheral to American life. Outside help secured independence; anxieties about commerce and foreign threats shaped the Constitutional Convention of 1787; diplomacy mattered to the survival of the young republic and to how the Civil War ended. The picture of an isolationist America is treated as a myth that flatters the national self-image, since the country has been an active participant in world affairs since 1776.

War carries much of the narrative. Each generation has had one, and those conflicts both fed the myths of national virtue and marked the stages by which the United States acquired a continent and then a world role.

Nicholls builds the book on a single distinction: race has held Haitians together, color has driven them apart. An awareness of shared racial identity, present from the earliest years, gave successive generations a stubborn commitment to national independence; color worked the other way, as rival factions repeatedly preferred foreign intervention to letting their opponents govern, and effective independence was worn away in the process.

He is careful about what the thesis does not claim. Race and color are not offered as the only forces at work, nor as reducible to economics; the chapters that follow tie them instead to class, to international relations, to religious and cultural movements, and to regional and personal loyalty, while granting that their prominence at any given moment tracks the economic conditions of that moment.

The preface carries the account past Jean-Claude Duvalier's flight, through the junta, the handling of former macoutes and Colonel Regala's ascendancy, to conclude that Duvalierism outlived the Duvaliers.

Historiography, as this book defines it, is the critical study of how historians go about reconstructing past events, as opposed to the statements they end up making. The term also names the history of history itself, and the shifting interpretations of any particular subject; it is the first, most general sense that is pursued here.

The starting point is that in most languages one word covers both what happened and the accounts we give of it. A library's history shelves hold books about the past rather than the past itself, and frequently books that tell incompatible stories about the same events.

From there the book surveys historical thinking from the earliest surviving narratives of Greece and China to the twenty-first century, closes with present-day debates and the new media reshaping how research is circulated, and adds a chapter on the training and career paths open to those who decide to make a profession of it.