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.

A technical manual explaining how USAID builds its annual Country Roadmaps, the scorecards it publishes for every low- and middle-income country it works with.

Two dimensions organise the exercise. Commitment covers what a country's laws, policies and informal norms actually do — open and accountable governance, inclusive development across gender and social groups, and economic policy. Capacity covers what it can deliver: government effectiveness, tax collection, safety and security, the strength of civil society and free media, the condition of citizens, and the productivity of the economy. Eighteen primary metrics carry the weight, eight on commitment and ten on capacity, with further secondary measures behind them.

For each metric the guide names the definition, the outside data source, and the place it occupies in the framework. Closing sections document the arithmetic: normalisation, aggregation, the time periods covered, what is done about missing data, and which countries are included.

Library organizations around the world moved quickly after the January 2010 earthquake. The American Library Association raised funds at its Midwinter Meeting in Boston, created a relief fund for rebuilding the country's libraries and archives, and began coordinating with the Blue Shield committee, IFLA and UNESCO. Its Black Caucus opened a separate fund channelled to relief agencies.

Much of the account concerns the Digital Library of the Caribbean, run out of Florida International University, which launched an initiative aimed at the National Archives and the country's three biggest heritage libraries. The buildings were standing but damaged, one of them likely to be demolished, and staff asked first for gloves, masks, archival boxes and temporary help, with shelving, equipment and conservation work to follow. The National Library came through with its shelving and holdings shifted.

Dayan begins from a reversal. Rather than reading Haiti through the French revolution, she reads the revolution from Haitian ground, where the promise of liberty and equality met the hard facts of property, labour and race. The stories of Toussaint, Christophe and Dessalines have been told and retold in Haiti itself, and they conflict according to who is telling them and to what end; Dayan turns away from mainstream historical accounts toward what Haitians wrote about themselves.

Much of the book dwells on figures who were either idealized or brutalized, and on scenes where illicit identities surface: Rochambeau inheriting Toussaint's household of women, the woman known as Defilee gathering up the pieces of Dessalines's body, Ezili as a spirit of love who forbids it, among others.

Underlying the reconstruction is vodou, taken not as exotica but, following a remark of Sidney Mintz that stayed with her, as a set of postulates about reality.

Commissioned for the United Nations Secretary-General, Collier's report contends that Haiti's economic prospects are far better than its standing among so-called fragile states suggests. He points to a calm and prosperous neighbourhood, the absence of ethnic division or an armed opposition, a large and politically effective diaspora in North America, wage costs competitive with China's, proximity to the American market, and nine years of guaranteed duty-free access under HOPE II.

What is missing, on this account, is not potential but a strategy. Donors have treated strategy as the government's business alone, yet capacity is thin and the decisive levers sit with donors, the Security Council, parliament and investors, so commitments have to be made together rather than in sequence.

Collier proposes a deliberately narrow programme organised around employment, basic services, food supply and the environment, with quick results credited to Haitians. Urgency comes from the shocks of 2008 and from the fixed horizons of MINUSTAH and HOPE II.

Rhodes reads the Georgia Gazette straight through from 1763 to 1799, along with papers in Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New York, London and Paris, and pulls out 123 items concerning Haitians. From them she reconstructs both an episode and the way it was reported.

The episode is the siege of Savannah in 1779, where men of colour from Saint-Domingue fought under d'Estaing beside American troops, and where several future leaders of Haitian independence got their first experience of war. White historians, she notes, have mostly passed over their part while Black historians have magnified it, and she treats the silence and the celebration as two forms of the same distortion.

She also traces what a partisan, Tory-controlled press chose to print and to withhold about Black soldiers and, later, about the revolution in the colony — an anxiety that resurfaces in the Charleston conspiracy trials of 1822.

Mocombe sets out to name and codify a philosophical system he finds already embedded in Vodou practice, calling it Haitian or Vilokan idealism. On his reading the cosmos is a single material universe made by Bondye out of itself, doubled into a profane world and a mirrored sacred one where the lwa exist as real concepts, ideals and skills reached through dreams, divination, trance, reason or ordinary experience.

He treats this as a form of transcendental idealism close to Kant's but departing from it at two points: the noumenal realm is knowable rather than sealed off, and the categories of understanding are supplemented by dream and trance states. Out of it he derives a hermeneutic phenomenology, a materialism, an antidialectics in which each person contends against everyone else's interpretation, and an ethic of reciprocal justice.

Later chapters follow these commitments through the revolution, the lakou and Haitian aesthetics, and argue that Haiti's metaphysics has outrun its sciences.

Drawing on fieldwork in the Marbial valley above Jacmel, Bastien describes how Haitian peasant families were actually organized, and how the arrangement was coming apart. His starting unit is the lakou, a cluster of huts on undivided family land, each household farming its own plot, presided over by a met whose authority is real over sons and largely ceremonial over cousins.

Land holds the arrangement together and also destroys it. A father parcels his holdings informally among his children, daughters included; at his death, vague boundaries, unrecognized heirs and defective titles produce lawsuits that break families, and the costs push peasants off the very land they fought to keep. Each lakou has its own graveyard and its inherited spirits, so the ground is ancestral as much as economic.

Bastien reads the resulting fragmentation, alongside erosion and population growth, as the setting for Haiti's agricultural crisis.

Taking up Trouillot's claim that the Haitian Revolution could not be thought at the moment it occurred, the editors move the argument from historiography into language. If the concepts adequate to the event were still being invented alongside it, its silencing was structural rather than merely retrospective — and literature, poised at the edge of the believable, becomes a privileged place to watch that pressure register.

They read Article Fourteen of the 1805 constitution, declaring all Haitians Black regardless of origin, as exactly such an invention: a performative act that collapses the classification it borrows from and turns an as-if into a promise still outstanding. Following Trouillot, they warn against letting uniqueness harden into exceptionalism.

The second thread is disciplinary. Romanticism has absorbed the French Revolution at length while treating Haiti as an afterthought. The volume asks what changes when Haiti enters not as subject matter but as an event in the history of Romanticism itself.

Hebblethwaite approaches the history of Haitian Creole through the language of Vodou. The rites and the sacred songs performed during services are in Haitian Creole, but their vocabulary reaches well beyond it, carrying items traceable to West African languages such as Fon, Yoruba, Ewe and Igbo, as well as to West Central African sources.

The available description breaks off at that point, before the study's findings, so its conclusions about those borrowings are not represented here.

A statistical portrait of Boston's Haitian-born population, issued by the city as part of a series on its immigrant communities. It dates the community's origins to Haitians fleeing the Duvalier regime from the late 1950s, and locates present-day settlement in Mattapan, Roxbury, Dorchester and Hyde Park, with movement outward to the South Shore and to Lawrence, Lowell and Worcester.

Census figures give roughly 18,900 Haitian-born residents in the city, the largest single immigrant group at a tenth of the foreign-born total. The profile covers age, marriage, naturalisation, schooling, occupation, labour-force participation and self-employment, measuring Haitians throughout against all foreign-born and all native-born residents.

Two results stand out. Attainment at the high-school level matches or exceeds both comparison groups while degree-holding lags far behind them. And a fifth of Haitian workers hold health-care support jobs, most of them registered nurses, four times the share among other immigrants and ten times that of the native-born.

Frost sets out to teach statistical reasoning to readers who mostly encounter numbers and charts produced by someone else and want to judge whether they can be trusted, and he does it with explanation rather than formal derivation.

An opening section pits statistical evidence against anecdote, using a weight-loss supplement to show why testimonials mislead: the people whose results were unremarkable never come forward, and a self-selected sample tells you nothing about anyone else. Observational studies, which measure many relevant variables and model the contribution of each, are distinguished from randomized controlled trials, which alone support causal conclusions.

The book then splits in two. The first half covers working tools — kinds of data, quantitative and categorical, continuous and discrete; histograms, boxplots and contingency tables, with cautions about how each can mislead; central tendency, variability, percentiles and correlation; and probability distributions, dwelling on the normal curve and standard scores. The second turns to inference from sample to population.

Fouchard, questioned as a historian of Haiti and of the Americas generally, moves from the island's first inhabitants to its cultural life under slavery. He begins with the Ciboney and the Arawak, the Taino settlement of the Greater Antilles and Caonabo's resistance, and refuses flatly to take part in any commemoration of Columbus, whom he holds responsible for a swiftly executed genocide and for ordering the mutilation of captives who ran.

Marronnage, he says, arrives with the first Africans in 1503 and carries its idea of freedom to the Indians. He argues at length that Toussaint Louverture's refusal to serve Napoleon's designs on the mainland cost France Louisiana and so made the American federation possible, a claim he thinks ought to be taught in United States schools.

The later part of the conversation turns to Saint-Domingue's theaters, the singer Minette, and comedies performed in Creole, from which Fouchard dates an indigenous current in Haitian art long preceding Price-Mars.

Between the September 1991 coup and the intervention that restored Aristide three years later, Haiti's military rulers made sexual assault an instrument of political terror. Rey argues this set the Cedras regime apart from the Duvalier dictatorships it otherwise imitated: women and girls in pro-Aristide neighbourhoods were attacked, frequently as reprisal when a male relative sought by soldiers could not be found.

The evidence comes from a survey of ninety-eight women who suffered abuse under the regime and from repeated interviews with two dozen of them over five years. The pattern points to a sharp escalation from mid-1993, and Rey holds that senior officers ordered it. Official inquiries, he shows, recorded only a small share of the cases.

The essay then asks what religion does for survivors. Belief supplies the terms in which the violence is understood, sometimes easing recovery and sometimes obstructing it, and Rey argues that it has also helped underwrite a culture permissive of sexual violence.

Bellegarde combines a compressed national history with a firsthand account of what the American occupation did to Haiti's institutions. The opening chapters run from the destruction of colonial Saint-Domingue through independence in 1804 and the long succession of nineteenth-century rulers -- Dessalines, Christophe, Petion, Boyer -- taking in the indemnity owed to France and the brief union with the Spanish east.

The heart of the book is 1915 and after. Bellegarde reconstructs the ratification of the Haitian-American convention, reproducing the speech of the deputy from Gonaives who tore off his rosette and resigned rather than sign, and sets out what the treaty actually conceded: a receiver general and a financial adviser named on Washington's designation, customs revenue pledged in a fixed order, a gendarmerie left as the republic's only armed force.

As minister of public instruction from 1918 to 1921 he testifies personally, listing the teacher-training schools Haitian law authorised and American financial officers refused to fund.

Mignolo presents decoloniality as an option rather than a creed: one of several trajectories he expects to shape the coming decades, alongside rewesternization, a reoriented Left, dewesternization, and a spiritual turn. He declines to pick a victor, arguing that the era in which any single course could claim to be the truth of history has ended.

The argument builds on Anibal Quijano's coloniality, which names what the rhetoric of modernity conceals and looks at it from the receiving end rather than, as world-system analysis does, from the vantage of the wealthy North. Fanon supplies the second thread: thinking starts from a body located in a particular history, which unsettles critical theory's placeless knower.

Later chapters read Renaissance periodization, Greenwich meridian time and Kant's geography as colonizations of time and space, then take Zapatista practice as a case where thought and action are one, closing on a cosmopolitanism that is plural and local rather than designed from Europe.

Fifty linked adventures of Bouqui, the gullible one, and Malice, who outwits him, taken down word for word from Haitian country storytellers and presented as a single cycle rather than scattered tales.

Comhaire-Sylvain then asks where they came from. Roughly twenty-five have African relatives, mostly in the hare cycle of West Africa and the Bantu world; five are widespread in Europe; two look Amerindian; seventeen she could place nowhere. Names carry their own evidence: Bouqui is the Wolof word for hyena, kept in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Louisiana and the Bahamas, while the hare became Lapin in the north and Malice in the south and west.

Foreign origins, she argues, do not make the corpus foreign. Nothing travels whole; a people takes only what answers to its own taste, and then reshapes it. Motives change, characters vanish, a bawdy Eastern farce turns into a mild moral story. What results belongs to Haiti.

A field study of the Haitian folktale, built from recordings taken from named tellers in Nippes, Plaisance and elsewhere, and concerned less with the stories than with how they work.

Comhaire-Sylvain separates the sung part from the spoken part. Songs are the conservative element: they hold onto Creole forms that everyday speech has dropped, and onto words nobody can translate any more, some of which she traces to African languages. Their meaning is often deliberately veiled, so that a tortoise's complaint about thorns and fruit turns out to be a warning about a dangerous man. The spoken portion varies with the teller, though set phrases, proverbs and metaphors recur at fixed points.

She catalogues the openings and closings — the exchange of cric and crac, the mock quarrel with the hero at the end — and sorts the tales by kind: origin stories, anecdotes, animal tales where cunning is the only virtue, realistic episodes, and marvels both Christian and pagan.

Roumain's novel follows Manuel, a young peasant who comes back to Fonds Rouge after years cutting cane in Cuba. He finds the village burnt dry by drought and split by a family quarrel, its people slack with resignation and leaning on ritual for relief. Against that he sets what he learned abroad: water can be found, and finding it is worth nothing unless the villagers agree to dig for it and share it.

Dash's introduction places the book in a line of Haitian peasant fiction reaching back to the turn of the century, and separates Roumain from contemporaries who made rural life into exotic spectacle. The title comes from a Creole phrase for the peasant who waters the fields, and carries the book's insistence that people can impose their will on their circumstances. The fable stays credible because Manuel's parents, and his courtship of Annaise, have lives of their own.

Redmond's subject is what he calls the second supercycle, the decades in which Britain went from an empire bleeding territory and money in America to the hegemon of the nineteenth century. He treats that outcome as improbable and worth explaining: France had three times the population, the strongest army in Europe, an alliance with Spain and vast Caribbean wealth as late as 1790.

Several puzzles organise the account. Why the Austrian, Ottoman and Qing empires proved so durable. Why victorious Britain left the Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish empires standing in reduced form. Why the East India Company could absorb fifty million South Asians but not two million colonists. Why the United States and Prussia emerged as new powers.

The American Revolution, read beside the Dutch Patriot rising, France, Brabant and Haiti, looks institutionally conservative — continuity of authority, no challenge to slavery, western land as the real motive. Culture enters too: Mozart's new public, Smith, Gibbon, Pitt's fiscal reordering.

The seventeenth century has long been described as an age of general crisis, and this volume argues that the label misleads. Between roughly 1600 and 1750 the European world-economy contracted, but its outer boundaries scarcely moved and no qualitative break occurred. What took place was a downturn inside a capitalist system already functioning, not the collapse of one order into another, and it was mild precisely because the crisis of feudalism had already been resolved.

Prices, cereal yields, land use, bullion stocks, wages and population all point to a plateau rather than a catastrophe. Contraction redistributed rather than destroyed. Core zones kept the higher-value industries while cheap textiles moved to rural peripheries, landlords in those peripheries met falling profits by pressing labor harder, and a semiperipheral zone consolidated in between.

Hegemony is the other thread: Dutch primacy is traced through production, then commerce, then finance, and its decline through the same sequence in the same order.

Hoffman argues that international child protection work in Haiti, and the family reunification drive that expanded after the 2010 earthquake, rest on assumptions about childhood and household that do not describe the country. Registries built to return separated children to their birth parents ran into a result that should have been expected: a large share of the children on them had left home long before the quake.

Movement between households is ordinary in Haiti. She assembles survey evidence that only about a third of children live with both biological parents, that most young people have left the household they were born into and many have done so repeatedly, and that these moves track work, schooling, the breakup of unions and death. Restavèk children sit inside this pattern rather than outside it. Drawing on the anthropology of childhood, Hoffman resists both the sensational image of slavery and blanket verdicts on children's labour, noting how unstable the status itself is.

Wynter starts from the pairing Coulthard drew between negritude and indigenismo, twentieth-century movements that answered colonial assumptions of racial and cultural superiority by asserting a distinct perspective of their own. Both arose, she argues, where running down a people's culture served to cheapen its labour.

That devaluation she traces to the conquest and to arguments like Sepúlveda's that peoples without writing had no culture and so barely counted as human — a myth of the cultural void by which European culture became a synonym for humanity, and the press finished what the gun began. Cultural racism, on this reading, is organic to Western capitalism, and the plantation turned the African captive from a person of defined status into labour power priced for a world market.

Her central case is Haiti, where Price-Mars found African belief surviving under the worst conditions. Wynter calls that process indigenization: the making of a people native to the ground they fought over.

A field geography of Haiti's Departement du Nord, built on survey work carried out in 1954 and on aerial photographs that Wood turned into planimetric maps for the southeastern stretch no earlier survey had covered. Soil samples were analysed in Port-au-Prince and at McMaster, and the land-use categories were designed so that each could be identified from the photographs themselves.

The exposition runs from landforms to climate to soils before it reaches land use, on the reasoning that where so much rain falls orographically, relief has to be understood first. Seven climatic types are distinguished on monthly rainfall alone, temperature varying too little to matter, and the intricate patterns of soil and population density are traced back to a complicated history of uplift, river capture and coastal deposition.

Behind the physical analysis sits a social observation: independence left a dispersed peasantry farming land no cadastral survey has ever recorded.

These essays weigh political explanations of Haitian poverty against economic ones, and generally find markets working better than their critics allow. The Duvalier state was authoritarian, but calling it totalitarian goes too far; the claim that merchants bent the nineteenth-century state at will is judged poorly evidenced; and Haitian landholding is held to bear little resemblance to Spanish America's, with sharecropping among near-equals easing access to land rather than blocking it.

On erosion, what decides the outcome is the number of hands on a plot and the intensity of their labour, not whether the crop is eaten or sold; perennial coffee, in fact, holds soil better than food crops do.

Later chapters survey the decline of sugar and sisal, cocoa and coffee, bauxite and essential oils, and reopen the quarrel over coffee marketing, re-examining Girault's case for exploitative middlemen and finding that the figures point the other way. A further chapter reviews Haitian classics from Price-Mars and Bellegarde onward.

Selden Rodman spent five decades collecting, dealing and writing about Haitian painting, and left his journals to an archive without cutting the passages that make him look worst. Gonzalez uses them to examine how one American critic came to regard Haiti's art world as his own creation.

Rodman's affection was genuine and his judgements consistent. He prized painters he took to be untutored, comparing them to Breughel and to Byzantine icons, and dismissed the urban, internationally minded artists of the Foyer des Arts Plastiques. Gonzalez observes that those he condemned were generally the ones working outside the Centre d'Art and beyond his reach as a dealer, and that his praise rested on assumptions about black innocence and white sophistication.

The chapter also tracks his accommodation with the Duvalier regime, whose character he understood clearly and criticised only in his private notebooks.

Law takes up a gap in the study of Christian missions in West Africa: the seventeenth-century Catholic efforts in Allada and Whydah, kingdoms on the Bight of Benin that Dahomey absorbed in the 1720s. Despite abundant printed documentation, no detailed study had been attempted, and general surveys handle the episode briefly and not always accurately.

Two things are done here. The first is narrative -- a fuller reconstruction of missionary enterprise from early Portuguese contact through the Dahomian conquests. The second is explanatory, asking why Africans responded to evangelisation as they did.

Kings, Law finds, were consistently more open to baptism than their chiefs, and he reads this politically. Royal authority was checked in practice by provincial governors and by the priesthoods of the local vodun; raising up a supreme god mirrored, and could serve, an expansion of the king's power. Whydah's rulers were meanwhile quarrelling openly with the python cult over offerings and attendance.

How the army came to own Haiti's economy is the question here. Gerlus answers it from the revolution itself: the estates the French left behind were nationalized, and the state that absorbed them was in practice the officer corps, which converted public property into the basis of a class of its own.

The framing draws on debates about the state's role in accumulation, from Marx and Engels through later theorists of development, and is then grounded in the conditions of a new nation cut off diplomatically and governed almost without interruption by soldiers.

The second half explains why military governments failed to revive plantation exports. Coercion could not hold workers on estates they were able to walk away from, and former slaves who fed themselves from their own plots were never made dependent on a wage. Without that dependence, Gerlus argues, no policy of production could take hold, whatever the rulers intended.

The American, French and Haitian revolutions are usually remembered separately, with Haiti's the one most often left out. Bender's essay for this catalogue insists on treating them as one event that remade the Atlantic world. French assistance won American independence, the debt it created forced the calling of the Estates General, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man was drafted by men including a veteran of the American war who consulted Jefferson in Paris.

What binds the three, on this account, is the long imperial rivalry of Britain, France and Spain, and above all the Seven Years' War, the first conflict waged on every continent, whose costs sent governments looking to their colonies for revenue.

Haiti is the limit case. Its revolution turned on slavery and the color bar, and white reaction came fast: Jefferson foresaw a racial storm reaching Virginia, and the United States refused recognition until Lincoln granted it during the Civil War.

The editors begin with the photograph on their cover, an empty and gleaming train carriage that could be almost anywhere, and use it to work through what a mobilities perspective actually asks. Where did this vehicle come from, who rides it, who maintains it, who is kept off it, what infrastructure lies beneath it, and how would anyone go about researching it?

They are explicit about what the book is not. Celebrations of speed, frictionlessness and borderless flow, written largely by people whose own movement is unimpeded, obscure more than they reveal.

What replaces them is a body of work spanning sociology, geography, anthropology, history and cultural studies, concerned with how movement reshapes economies and government, provokes fear and regulation, and produces stark inequality between undocumented migrants and business-class elites. Seven recurring themes, from the qualities of movement to questions of method, organise the volume's seven sections.

Girard looks at the French Revolutionary wars from the Caribbean end, where the doctrine that won battles in Europe ran up against the institutions the colonies were built on. Mass conscription was unthinkable where nine in ten inhabitants were enslaved and kept away from weapons, and free men of colour, who had served before, could hardly fight as citizen-soldiers for an order that refused them citizenship.

Emancipation, he argues, was worth more than tactics or naval support, since it could turn hundreds of thousands of enemies into allies at a stroke. The catch was that colonies without slaves might not be worth holding at all.

France's answer changed with its politics. Reluctant at first, it emancipated in 1794, and for the next four years the alliance with the formerly enslaved underwrote an aggressive strategy and plans for expeditions against British, Spanish and American territory. Bonaparte's restoration of slavery in 1802 lost the richest colonies despite massive white reinforcements.

Fiehrer sets out to give substance to a phrase often invoked and seldom examined: Louisiana's connection to the Caribbean. He follows French settlement of northwestern Hispaniola from the buccaneering decades through the Treaty of Ryswick to a colony whose enslaved population grew steadily until 1803, and traces the move from indigo to the sugar and coffee that made planters rich enough to resent the Crown's monopolists and the Nantes slavers.

Much of the essay is corrective. Refugee families of the lower Mississippi cherish a story of narrow escape from butchery, and the antebellum press supplied the imagery: a docile bondswoman on one side, a cannibal insurgent on the other. Measured against correspondence, census returns and the numbers who reached Cuba, France and the eastern seaboard over fourteen years of movement, the tale of mass killing has thin support.

Through the eighteenth century the two colonies depended on one another, and many south Louisianians descend from those who left.

Geggus weighs how much slave resistance actually accomplished in ending Atlantic slavery, and finds it rarely decisive on its own. Across the Americas he identifies only two cases where it was: the 1848 rising in the Danish West Indies, itself touched off by news from the French colonies, and the French Caribbean of the 1790s.

Saint-Domingue is the strong case, and he defends it against both understatement and overstatement. The 1791 insurrection was a necessary cause of the 1793 proclamations and the general decree of February 1794, but not a sufficient one. What shifted the balance was war with Spain and Britain in 1793, which stranded French troops across the Atlantic, let Spain recruit the insurgent leaders, and drove Sonthonax from a narrow proclamation covering men who would fight to general abolition.

Historians who say the commissioners merely ratified a freedom already seized are mistaken: much of the plantation system was still standing that August.

A documentary collection built around a long introductory history of the French Caribbean between 1789 and 1804. The introduction sets the ground: buccaneers who became planters, a colony the size of Maryland producing two-fifths of Europe's sugar and three-fifths of its coffee, and a labour regime so lethal that a third to a half of those who survived the Atlantic crossing died within a few years of arrival.

The narrative runs from the insurrection of August 1791, launched by a coalition of African-born and island-born plantation workers, through the emancipation decrees of 1793 and 1794, to Bonaparte's attempt at reconquest, which succeeded in Guadeloupe and failed in Saint-Domingue.

The documents gathered afterwards come from every side: planters and free men of colour, French officials and generals, Toussaint Louverture's colonial constitution, Delgres's last proclamation, American reactions, and Vodou songs about Dessalines. Maps, a chronology and questions for discussion accompany them.

Bloch traces how "noble" hardened from a loose comparative term into the name of a class. In the first feudal age it could mean little more than standing above one's neighbours, and it turns up constantly in the comparative form; it carried no legal content. What it marked was a manner of living and a dominance that grew as government broke down and ties of protection spread through society.

What defined the group was less landholding as such than the shape of its wealth. Tolls, market dues and fines on local trade were prized alongside the soil, and the constant was that a noble's income came from work performed by other people. He was a lord of manors first of all, and anyone holding manors belonged by that fact to the upper ranks. Later chapters take up chivalry, the nobility's way of life, and its eventual conversion into a class defined in law.

The Herskovitses begin with the distinctions the Black population of Paramaribo draws among itself: town people, plantation people, and the "Djuka" of the deep interior — categories at once geographical and racial, shading into finer gradings of colour, status and residence, and set among neighbours of Dutch, Indian, Javanese, Chinese and Amerindian descent.

The opening part describes daily life in the city: the dress of the koto-missi, the proverbs encoded in the patterns and tyings of head-kerchiefs, the compound yard, courtship, marriage and divorce, birth customs and their dangers, and the akra — the ruling spirit that comes to a person at birth and shields them from enemies human and divine.

The volume then collects tales, riddles and several hundred songs, sacred and secular, transcribed and analysed at length for scale, interval, rhythm and vocal form, with the drums described individually and Haitian material included for comparison.

A one-volume gathering of the plays and poems, glossed for readers rather than scholars. Obscure words are explained line by line at the foot of the page, difficult passages are paraphrased, and the text is broken up with maps, town prospects, portraits and Victorian engravings of famous scenes.

The introductory essay places the writing inside a working theatre. A Swiss visitor's account of Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599, the standing of Burbage, performances at court, the Inns of Court and the universities, and the company's decision to take on an indoor playhouse alongside the Globe — a move said to lie behind the masques, music and spectacle of the late plays and the collaboration with Fletcher.

The Sonnets are read as autobiography, published in 1609 without the poet's involvement and badly proofed; the dedication to Mr W. H. is explained by Elizabethan forms of address. Stratford, the Halls, and the end of the line close it out.

Urban growth in Haiti has taken the form of what Beckett calls slumification, and it has produced a pervasive sense of crisis. The article sets out the history of that urban crisis and works through instances of slum-making to show how the shape of the city has been produced by a dialectic between the state and statelessness.

Port-au-Prince is where that dialectic plays out. Residents feel they ought to fall within the state's reach and at the same time feel shut out. The capital holds political and administrative power, yet it is routinely described as ungoverned terrain, a visible sign that the state is missing.

Beckett argues the reverse. The capital's troubles arise not because governance is missing but because of the particular way it is done, which he names the art of not governing.

The document collected here is the royal edict of 1685, issued under Louis XIV and printed in the 1687 Paris volume on the policing of France's American islands. Later decrees adjusted particular articles, but this first version laid down the framework that governed slavery in the French colonies until 1789.

Its opening article expels all Jews from the colonies; in the Dutch Caribbean they held a real if secondary commercial position, while under French rule they could own neither property nor enslaved people. The edict likewise requires that enslaved people be instructed as Catholics rather than Protestants.

Most of the code, however, is given over to fixing the legal condition of slavery — inherited through the mother, not the father — and to tight regulation of the conduct of the enslaved, who are left with almost nothing in the way of rights. Masters, for their part, are directed to provide for the sick and the old.

After the Cuban revolution the Caribbean became a theatre of superpower rivalry, and Haiti, forty miles from Cuba and astride the Windward Passage, recovered a strategic value it had lost. Gerlus follows what that meant for relations between Washington and Port-au-Prince from about 1960 to the middle of the 1980s.

Successive American administrations, judging containment more urgent than the conduct of their allies, treated the Duvaliers as a bulwark and set aside what they knew about repression. The Duvaliers understood the bargain and worked it. The father invoked a communist threat largely of his own manufacture to draw military and financial support; the son priced his cooperation openly, warning of Cuban designs in order to extract weapons and aid.

The dependence this created cut both ways. By the Reagan years Haiti's reliance on American assistance gave Washington the leverage to obtain an interdiction agreement aimed at Haitians leaving by boat.

These are notes rather than a finished argument, and Bellegarde-Smith says so. What he offers is a set of reflections on death, pointing toward further work rather than closing the subject.

The Gede preside over death and sexuality, and their annual services draw crowds from across the Haitian diaspora. He asks what accounts for that hold. The answer runs through a Vodou theology he describes as humanistic rather than god-centred, in which the person stands at the centre of the cosmos, body, mind and soul are held in balance, and power is energy that can be enhanced, diminished or transferred.

Where Legba opens onto chance and possibility, the Gede supply the one certainty. Faces powdered white, dressed in black and purple, a lens missing from their glasses, they are bawdy and funny and see into two worlds at once. In mocking respectability they mock structures of domination, standing outside race, class and nation while remaining pointedly gendered.

Plummer uses tourism as a way into Haitian-American relations rather than writing a history of the industry or assessing its contribution to Haitian development. The choice carries a methodological argument: diplomatic history restricted to formal dealings between governments has tended to absorb the assumptions of the policymakers it studies, and widening the evidence to cultural and ideological material breaks that circle.

Caribbean tourism began as a sideline of shipping firms carrying North American goods to island markets and advertising the scenery to cabin passengers, then grew with the cruise liner. Haiti's turn required a change in how the country was pictured. Occupation-era books and films had made it barbarous and sensational; by the end of the 1930s American social scientists who rejected racial hierarchy, private agencies, and above all educated Haitians themselves had shifted opinion.

The trends that produced the boom, Plummer argues, also set its limits, leaving Haitian poverty admired for its fortitude and then ignored.

Farrington asks how dominicanidad, Dominican identity, took its present shape, and answers by way of the Dominican Republic's long entanglement with Haiti.

The account starts with colonial developments and conflicts, and the factors that produced two ethnically distinct states on one island. It moves next to the Trujillo regime's policy toward Haiti, then to the way dominicanidad is presented in the media and the ways Dominicans identify themselves individually and as a group.

Historical factors are tied to present-day outcomes and to current political developments, and the conclusion identifies conflict in the past as a major ingredient of Dominican ethnic identity today.

Mobley resituates colonial Saint-Domingue inside a West Central African frame, on the argument that a colony where nine in ten people were enslaved and most of those African-born cannot be read without knowing where in Africa they came from. Archival research, comparative ethnography and historical linguistics are combined to trace the people sold into the Atlantic trade at Loango back toward their points of origin.

Most, she concludes, came from the coastal kingdoms themselves and from the Mayombe rainforest inland — places where exposure to European religion was slight or nonexistent, which unsettles the claim that such arrivals were already Atlantic creoles. Reading the colony's Kongolese spiritual practitioners, among them Makandal and Marie Kingué, against evidence from those same regions, she argues that what they carried was practical expertise applied to the problems of plantation life, and that it supplied the materials of independent Haiti — the lakou, and the Kongo and Petro rites.

Soccer resists being written about, and the book starts from that difficulty. A match is already its own tragedy and its own comedy; the writers who try, from Knausgaard imagining a book built on a single ninety minutes to a poet who answered all sixty-four games of a World Cup in verse, end up assembling fragments.

Part of what makes the game strange is its time. The clock never stops, whatever happens, and the referee may add only a few minutes at the end. Ninety minutes is a promise the sport keeps, unlike basketball or baseball. The rules have barely shifted since the nineteenth century, though the Situationist Asger Jorn once devised a three-sided version on a hexagon with no referee, where alliances form and dissolve as play goes on.

From there the book proceeds position by position — the goalkeeper, isolated and blamed; the defender — using each role to explain how the game is actually played and watched.

This is a study edition of the New Revised Standard Version, the translation descended from the King James Bible by way of the Revised and Revised Standard Versions and authorised for use by Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches alike.

The prefatory material explains the choices behind it: the Hebrew and Greek critical editions used, the handling of the divine name, the footnote conventions that mark variant readings and conjectural corrections, and the instruction to remove masculine-oriented language wherever that could be done without falsifying an ancient patriarchal setting. The committee's working rule was to stay as literal as possible and as free as necessary.

Around the text sit book introductions, running annotations and a set of general essays. The essay on the Torah, for instance, weighs documentary against supplementary accounts of how the Pentateuch was assembled, and argues that its redactors deliberately preserved contradictory voices rather than smoothing them into one.

Mignolo gathers and rewrites earlier essays into a single argument about what he calls the colonial matrix of power, the structure of control laid down in the sixteenth century and still running, now through knowledge and artificial intelligence as much as through territory. His preference for investigation over research is deliberate: the latter borrows the prestige of the hard sciences and their claim on what counts as knowing.

The opening part treats race as a problem made by the classifier rather than the classified, a question of concepts rather than of bodies, and follows it from the Atlantic slave trade through the Holocaust to the disposability of migrants and refugees. Later parts ask whose humanity the language of human rights actually speaks for, chart a shift away from five centuries of Westernization, and set Andean thinkers beside European ones.

The aim throughout is to unsettle the assumptions behind Western knowing and sensing rather than to argue with their content.

Suarez reads Jean-Robert Cadet's Restavec as testimony rather than memoir - a disclosure undertaken, as such disclosures always are, at the cost of returning to what happened. Cadet, born Alfrenold Brutus to a wealthy man and a factory worker, was handed after his mother's death to his father's former mistress and raised in fear and shame as an unpaid child servant.

The book splits between Haiti and the United States, but Suarez notes that the American chapters stay governed by the Haitian injury: nightmares, a marriage lived alongside the trauma, Cadet's own likening of his long silence to that of a rape victim.

She sets the book against documentary films and campaigns on behalf of restavek children, and against a literature that has minimized or denied the arrangement altogether. Cadet's circumstances were atypical, but his survival contradicts the claim that such placements benefit the child, and his writing joins a long tradition of autobiography used as political act.

Geggus examines what the destruction of Saint-Domingue and the founding of Haiti meant for Spanish and Portuguese America. News travelled fast along maritime routes, carried by sailors, refugees and privateers, and slaveholders across the hemisphere began complaining that their slaves had grown insolent. Medallions of Dessalines turned up on militiamen in Rio; a Cuban association replaced the Spanish crown on its banner with a Haitian cocked hat.

He is more cautious about causation. Rebellions did cluster in these decades, but tax increases, colonial reforms, debates at the Cortes of Cadiz and the rhythms of the slave trade explain much of the pattern, and the claim that Haiti changed what slave resistance fundamentally was does not hold up against the Latin American evidence.

Real connections existed nonetheless, Aponte's Havana conspiracy of 1812 being the clearest, though Haitian governments avoided exporting revolt for fear of a blockade cutting off their arms.

Luhmann opens by asking why sociology has produced no theory of society since its founding generation. The classics escaped a circular difficulty by locating themselves historically and by taking individual and society as a settled pair — a distinction whose own unity was never posed as a problem, since society was simply assumed to consist of people.

His alternative is deliberately austere. Society is not composed of human beings and does not stop at national borders; it is a self-producing system of communication, and the concept he wants is neither humanist nor territorial nor realist about its object. Tying society to the nation-state, as he says Giddens effectively does, makes the term redundant and hands everything interesting to a separate notion of the global system.

The awkward consequence he accepts is autology. Sociology belongs to what it observes, so its theory is society describing itself, carried out in the mode of second-order observation.

Trouillot's argument that the revolution in Haiti was, in its own moment, unthinkable — that European thought had no categories for enslaved people conceiving of freedom and founding a state — is Tomich's starting point and also his target. He accepts the account of silencing but presses on its looseness. It supplies no procedure for relating the long structures of Western ontology to a particular event, and it risks reading the revolution backwards from its outcome, treating the enslaved as fully formed revolutionary subjects from the beginning.

His test case is Victor Schoelcher, whose book on Haiti appeared in 1843 after the first visit there by a European abolitionist. Schoelcher arrived a republican heir of the Enlightenment, anxious about what he would find, and found stagnation. He blamed not race but Boyer's autocracy and a mulatto elite immobilised by fear of the black majority, and made Toussaint the figure who turned revolt into a movement for liberty.

Written in Kreyòl and framed as a family gathering at which a long-absent traveller returns to report what he has found out, Trouillot's book asks where Haitian misery came from and answers with a class analysis of the colony and the revolution.

He reads the Code Noir not as protection for the enslaved but as legislation serving the planters who ran Saint-Domingue and the French merchants they in turn served, since law follows the interests of whoever controls the state. He explains why a slave system had to keep its workers alive in order to keep working them, and devotes a long stretch to the middle stratum — artisans, clerks, gendarmes, white and mulatto and black — whose position between the two fundamental classes made it both restless and the most prejudiced of all.

The rising of August 1791 is then set inside those contradictions, along with the diverging aims of the rebel commanders and of the enslaved mass.

A documentary collection built around Toussaint Louverture, opening with an editor's survey of the society he came out of: some four hundred fifty thousand enslaved people against a white minority a fifteenth their number, a Code Noir that restrained nothing, mortality high enough to require constant fresh imports, and a colony administered entirely from France with no representative assembly to absorb colonial grievance.

That introduction also sketches what resistance looked like before 1791, from poisoning and marronage answered by mounted patrols manned by free men of color to a long run of conspiracies, the most ambitious of them Mackandal's betrayed plot of 1758.

The documents follow. A first part gathers Toussaint's own proclamations, beginning with the calls to arms of 1793 that answered Sonthonax's emancipation offer by insisting the enslaved should take their liberty themselves. A second collects the sharply divided verdicts of contemporaries, republican Frenchmen among them.

Saint-Domingue's free population of African descent numbered some twenty-seven thousand by 1789, and a few of them owned slaves. King uses that fact to reopen the standard portrait of Toussaint Louverture as a gifted plantation coachman who rose out of bondage only in 1791.

Following Debien's discovery that Toussaint's name is absent from the Breda slave lists of 1785, King argues that he passed the years before the revolution as a free man: a small planter and slaveholder in his own right, at home in the propertied free colored world rather than in the field gangs.

The revision matters for how the revolution is read. If the leader who did most to secure its success came out of that class rather than the maroon camps and the sugar works, then the familiar story of 1791 as a rising conspired by runaways and slave foremen needs more room in it for free people of color and their ambiguous position.

Born a slave on Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture obtained his freedom, took up planting on a modest scale, and bought slaves of his own. Girard makes that contradiction central rather than incidental.

The book follows Louverture from freedman to revolutionary leader, crediting him with planning the slave revolt of 1791, and on to 1801, when he governed the colony in which he had once been property. What he wanted throughout, acceptance as a member of the colonial elite, he never received; he died after a year in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless fed movements for Black nationalism and against colonial rule far into the twentieth century.

Girard draws on extensive research in primary sources, conducted in archives in many countries and in several languages, and the publisher presents the result as the definitive life of Louverture.

Issued at Cap Francais in November 1801 and labelled dictatorial by his biographer Schoelcher, this proclamation gathers most of Toussaint Louverture's domestic programme into a single document.

It opens as self-justification. War was waged with restraint, defeated enemies received as brothers, rank held as a trust rather than a reward. It then turns into a long complaint about morals. Parents in the towns are accused of raising children in idleness and in contempt for farming; unemployed women, foreigners spreading rumours, officers keeping concubines and idle domestics are all named as threats to public order. Labour becomes an obligation on everyone capable of it, marriage the institution the state must defend, religion the ground of civic virtue.

The decrees that follow put teeth in the sermon, making commanders criminally answerable for revolts they failed to foresee or suppress. Liberty here means disciplined cultivation, not release from work.

Before the man was Louverture he was Toussaint Bréda, named for the plantation where he was born to an African father who had survived the Middle Passage. The chapter sets that obscure life against the colony that made it: the destruction of the Taino, the French seizure of western Hispaniola, and a sugar and coffee boom importing some thirty thousand captives a year by the late 1780s.

Much of what circulates about his boyhood — Dahomean royal descent, the frail child nicknamed Fatras-Bâton, the precocious reader of Caesar and Raynal — comes from legend, from his son Isaac's memoir, or from C.L.R. James, and each claim is weighed against a thin archive. What holds up is a trilingual man of Fon, Kreyòl and French, taught by Jesuits and by his godfather, anchored in Catholicism and a wide network of kin, and free long before 1791 — a free man who, as he later took care to obscure, owned slaves himself.

American policy toward the revolution in Saint-Domingue was never settled, and this account explains the oscillation as a contest between economic interests rather than a matter of principle. Northern shipping and merchant houses wanted the trade. Southern planters, who had most to lose from a successful slave revolt next door, wanted the rebels isolated or crushed. Which group had the ear of the sitting administration determined where policy went.

Washington's cabinet began by helping France hold its colony. Later administrations leaned toward the rebels, at moments even toward encouraging independence, then back toward France. Only when Jefferson's embargo, coupled with the collapse of Haitian exports, drove the maritime interests out of the argument did an openly hostile policy emerge.

Racism was pervasive, but it is not offered as the whole explanation. Many Americans, north and south, recoiled from the bloodshed of the French revolution, and saw in Haiti a military autocracy rather than a fellow republic.