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.

Mocombe reads Dessalines through phenomenological structuralism, a structurationist framework, and argues that he differs from Haiti's traditional leaderships in a specific way.

Having avenged the island's Taino and African populations against France, Spain, and Britain, Dessalines attempted to mediate between two incompatible modes of social and system integration. On one side stood the Catholic and Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism carried by mulatto elites and creole petit-bourgeois blacks who had taken on their former masters' worldview. On the other stood the African majority's Vodou ethic and its spirit of communism, an ethos they had merged with that of the Taino.

Where the first two classes wanted Haiti absorbed into the capitalist world-system of nineteenth-century Europe, Dessalines tried to constitute the nation within both frameworks at once. Working from a structural Marxist account of practical consciousness, the book examines the roots of his policies and concludes that his death drained the revolution of its momentum.

Matthewson reconstructs Jefferson's dealings with Saint-Domingue and then with independent Haiti, and argues that neither his professed dislike of slavery nor his racism accounts for what he did. What governed him throughout was his identification with Virginia's planters and his determination to secure Louisiana and the Southwest.

Jefferson helped bring French power in the Caribbean down, which brought the Haitians their independence and at the same time opened enormous tracts of land to slaveholders. The reaction that followed, fed by the massacres of 1804 and by the Virginia conspiracies of 1800 and 1802, hardened southern opinion. He gave up his hope of early emancipation, rebuffed Dessalines, and settled on embargo and refusal of recognition, a policy that survived until 1862 at the cost of northern merchants.

Racial fear is granted a real but secondary place, and the shift of antislavery leadership from the United States to Britain is dated to these years.

Matthewson traces how a president who privately urged gradual emancipation came to embargo trade with the hemisphere's second independent republic and withhold recognition from it. Jefferson encouraged Saint-Domingue's separation from France and inherited a pragmatic line from Adams, but Gabriel's conspiracy in 1800 and the Easter Plot of 1802 hardened Virginian opinion, and he faced a Congress unwilling to countenance a black state.

Earlier accounts explained the embargo chiefly by Jefferson's appetite for the Floridas and his wish to oblige Napoleon. Matthewson reads it instead as a victory for southern conservatives, arguing that defending slavery at home required disparaging Haiti abroad. He places the decision beside Britain's, which in the same years moved to end its own slave trade and cultivate influence on the island while the United States turned to planting the southwest with slave labour.

Jefferson's stated aversion to slavery, on this account, never survived contact with racial fear and loyalty to Virginia's planter class.

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.

In August 1704 a young Kongolese woman named Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita rose from a sickbed convinced that Saint Anthony had taken up residence in her head and charged her with putting the Kingdom of Kongo back together. Thornton follows her from that vision into the movement she built, and sets both against a country split among rival claimants to a vacant throne.

The reconstruction rests on the reports of Italian Capuchins stationed in Kongo, Bernardo da Gallo and Marcellino d'Atri above all. Thornton is open about his own hand in the material: he restores reported speech to the first person so that participants speak directly, and he standardises Kikongo names on twentieth-century usage rather than seventeenth-century Portuguese spelling.

He rejects readings of the Antonian movement as early nationalism in a semi-colonial setting, placing it instead within Kongolese Christianity and dynastic conflict, and he writes the whole as narrative rather than argument, for readers outside the university.

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.

Herskovits went to Mirebalais in central Haiti in 1934 and set out to describe an entire rural community rather than one exotic practice. The result answers, by demonstration, the foreign habit of reducing Haiti to drums and sorcery.

The valley lies some thirty-five miles from Port-au-Prince, with converted trucks running to the coast a few times a week: near the capital, and by every other measure far from it. Its economy rests not on employer and hired hand but on cooperative labour, the coumbite; its social organisation follows a logic of its own, which he traces back through Moreau de Saint-Méry to the parish's colonial beginnings.

A long section goes to vodun — pantheon, services, dances — and a later chapter to its dealings with Catholicism. That encounter is the theoretical payoff: vodun gave Herskovits his clearest instance of syncretism, and the valley gave him somewhere to watch it happen. Notes on method and a Creole glossary close the book.

Writing after the 2010 earthquake, Glick Schiller notes how readily reporters now speak of the Haitian diaspora as a settled fact, and how recent and contested that assumption is. Disaster, epidemic and collective stigma pull people into a shared identity that many would otherwise decline.

Her foreword takes up the puzzle running through the volume it opens: contributors insist on the plurality of Haitian settlement, from Boston and Michigan to the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe and Paris, while still invoking a single diaspora. She resists the choice between a model in which diasporic consciousness circulates uniformly and one in which local experience is primary, arguing that localities and nation-states are neither bounded nor separable from the circuits running through them.

Racialization in a Paris suburb or a Dominican batey is shaped at once by local politics and by global narratives about blackness, and Haiti's revolutionary history remains part of the contest over those narratives.

A grant from the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme funded the digitization of part of the holdings at the Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Frères de l'Instruction Chrétienne in Port-au-Prince, and this account follows that work through. Along the way the authors sketch how the library came to hold what it does — generations of collectors, students, alumni, and staff who kept the material intact — pick out some of what the nineteenth-century newspapers contain, and give space to the current Executive Director.

Collaboration is presented as central to the result: dLOC supplied further support while BHFIC staff carried out a substantial share of the scanning themselves. The closing pages turn on an uncomfortable point about the field. Projects meant to open up Haitian historical sources operate inside the same inequalities they set out to contest, paywalled access being one instance, and the authors ask how such initiatives might serve cultural and historical institutions better than they now do.

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.

Sheller proposes mobility justice as a single frame for problems usually kept apart: transport equity, policing and incarceration, border walls and deportation, sexual violence, eviction, and climate change. Each, on her account, turns on who is permitted to move, who is held still, and who decides.

The book works across scales, from the body through the street, city and nation to the planet, on the premise that these are not separate arenas but one entangled system, and that movement is what makes and remakes them. Against theories of justice she calls sedentary, which take their object to be stable before it is set in motion, she offers an ontology in which justice is itself unstable and emergent.

History carries weight here: the regulation of movement under slavery and colonial rule helped constitute the free, white, mobile subject of liberal politics. She credits the organizers who coined the term, and ends each chapter with specific principles rather than a general prescription.

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.

An alphabetical reference for students and researchers in physical anthropology and neighboring fields. Entries define terms drawn from human anatomy and osteology, genetics and cell biology, primate behavior and taxonomy, evolutionary theory, and the archaeology of early stone tool industries.

Coverage runs from named fossil specimens and extinct primate genera to competing models of how Neandertals and anatomically modern populations overlapped in Europe, and to congenital and infectious conditions that mark bone and so concern paleopathologists. Cross-references connect related entries, flag obsolete or alternative usages, and point to an appendix for the placement of fossil species.

Garrigus reconstructs the career of Julien Raimond, an indigo planter, one-quarter African by descent, from Saint-Domingue's southern coast who became the foremost campaigner for racial reform in revolutionary Paris -- and who is remembered chiefly as a hypocrite, having told free men of colour and later rebel slaves that they owed France a debt while himself sinking under debts to French creditors.

Against that reputation four claims are advanced. Raimond's early life shows colonial racism hardening in the 1760s, when men of mixed ancestry who had been treated as social equals were barred from office and made to document their status. His success in persuading Parisian abolitionists to attack prejudice rather than bondage cleared the ground for the uprising of August 1791. His argument for keeping freedpeople at work was taken up by revolutionary governments across the Antilles. And his turn towards Toussaint Louverture in 1800 marked an early reading of what Bonaparte intended.

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.

Rouse presents this as a report on procedure rather than on findings. The material comes from the Fort Liberte region of northern Haiti, already excavated and sorted; the question is how to turn artifacts into history.

The method rests on two units. A type is the set of attributes shared by a class of objects, treated as an abstract pattern rather than as the objects themselves. A mode is a single attribute -- a design, a technique, a property such as hardness -- handled on its own as a culture trait equal in standing to a type. Types are reached by classification, modes by analysis.

Both are traced from site to site and, once a time scale is built from the shifting frequencies of eight selected modes, from period to period. Diffusion, persistence and replacement then read those distributions as events. Culture, Rouse insists, lies in the standards guiding the artisan, not in the objects.

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.

Largey examines how the Haitian bandmaster Occide Jeanty became, in the telling of his admirers, a figure of national defiance during the American occupation of 1915 to 1934, and what that transformation reveals about the making of historical meaning.

Jeanty's compositions commemorating the war of independence carried criticism of the occupying forces that Haitian audiences could hear even when foreigners could not. Largey calls the process recombinant mythology: speakers borrow the language of myth to praise a hero's qualities, and so link him to earlier heroes. Jean-Jacques Dessalines had already undergone such a fusion, absorbed into Vodou as a form of Ogou, at once the general who defended the republic and the body torn apart by the elite in 1806. President Florvil Hyppolite, whose death echoed that of Dessalines, was drawn into the same chain of stories.

Myth and history, on this account, are not separate domains but linked ways of holding on to the past.

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.

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.

How Haitians have commemorated their own founding is, Zavitz argues, a subject no one had studied at length. Her dissertation supplies the first extended interdisciplinary account, running from independence to the present and drawing on national holidays, historiography, literature, oral tradition and interviews conducted in Port-au-Prince.

Following Trouillot on how silences are produced, she looks for what commemoration omits as much as what it asserts, and for the counter-memories that press against the narratives of the powerful, reshaping them over time. The first of January 1804 anchors the account: she traces a century of Independence Day observance and the making of Dessalines as its presiding figure, showing officials drawing on symbols from France, Africa and the Americas.

Later chapters follow the rival mulâtriste and noiriste legends through Haitian letters, and the successive waves of indigénisme that brought the peasantry, Kreyòl and Vodou into a contest over who made the nation.

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.

Gillikin follows the people who reached Charleston from Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1822 — ruined planters, gens de couleur and enslaved people alike — and asks how a slaveholding southern city absorbed them. Charlestonians had been reading about the island for years before the largest group landed in 1793, and sympathy for dispossessed planters was already shadowed by suspicion of their politics and dread of what the newcomers might carry.

Assimilation, she argues, was neither quick nor smooth, and it turned on regional particulars: South Carolina's commercial and educational ties to Europe and the Caribbean made distant events feel immediate, and its leaders were caught between kinship with the French and their obligations under a new federal constitution. Refugees were repeatedly drawn into local arguments about republicanism, their standing rising and falling with France's reputation through the Terror, Napoleon and the Restoration.

Gathering Stuart Hall's writing on art, photography and film, this collection is framed by Tawadros as the record of a deliberate detour: Hall's move away from the apparent solidity of politics and economics into culture and the visual, from which he returned with sharper accounts of power. Culture, in his phrase, was the domain of indirection.

The introduction traces how race gave Hall his angle. The 1970s Birmingham research that became Policing the Crisis let him see that Thatcherism was less an electoral victory than a change of historical conjuncture. By the late 1980s he was arguing that blackness is a constructed political and cultural category with no guarantee in nature, and that regimes of representation had to be interrogated rather than simply inverted.

The book follows Hall into institution-building, at Autograph and iniva and eventually Rivington Place, and into long friendships with artists, Isaac Julien above all.

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.

Geggus points to an oddity in the study of slave resistance: the one revolt that succeeded, destroying the richest colony in the world and producing Haiti, has been largely left out of it. The field concentrated on the English-speaking Caribbean and Brazil, or on forms of resistance short of armed revolt, and knowledge of the Saint-Domingue rising had advanced little since accounts published in 1853 and 1920.

Much of the paper tests the conceptual apparatus that field had built, and finds it unstable. Attempts to sort genuine resistance from mere intransigence, violent from passive, inward from outward, break down under pressure. It is not obvious that a solitary runaway was more political than the killing of a hated master, or that a midwife's infanticide was less so than a workforce downing tools.

Armed revolt, ranked highest in these schemes, was usually futile and self-destructive, its aims frequently muddled and not necessarily the abolition of slavery.

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.

A succession of international economic assistance programs, Wisner argues, is what produced Haiti's food crisis. The policies dealt a heavy blow to domestic agriculture, and a country that had fed itself became chronically insecure and correspondingly exposed to starvation, malnutrition, earthquakes and pandemics.

The claim is legal as much as historical. Food insecurity on this scale amounts to a violation of the right to food, and to rights of health, education and work besides. None of those who imposed the policies — international financial institutions such as the World Bank among them — has accepted responsibility, which is why Wisner presses the case for compliance and remedy by foreign actors.

The paper sets out the emerging recognition of extraterritorial obligations, identifies domestic, regional and international mechanisms where claims arising from them might be adjudicated, and proposes how the doctrine could be applied to existing means of protecting people from harm and compensating them for it.

Sepinwall traces what became of Silencing the Past after 1995. Trouillot's book examined how historical narratives are produced and how the writing of history is tied to power -- not the tired line that victors write history, but an analysis of the gap between what occurred and what is said to have occurred, of archives that mute the defeated, and of habits of mind that keep certain events from registering at all.

The essay shows that the book was no immediate success and gathered its authority slowly, and it pays particular attention to the chapter treating the Haitian Revolution as unthinkable history.

Sepinwall's own case is that the reception has been uneven. Some of Trouillot's propositions are now common ground; others have been passed over or turned to uses he would have rejected. She is sharpest on non-Haitian scholars who cite the essay approvingly while writing about the Revolution in ways it was meant to rule out.

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.

Law examines the female soldiers of the West African kingdom of Dahomey, a corps drawn from the royal wives and known to Europe through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers, above all Frederick Forbes and Richard Burton. The name fastened on them was European; in Dahomean usage they were ahosi, women of the palace.

He begins by prising them apart from the classical myth. The Amazons of antiquity were imagined as a community that kept no men, which Law reads as an expression of male anxiety rather than a description of anywhere real. Dahomey's were a female corps inside a largely male army, which leaves it unclear whether they represent women's power or one more use made of women.

Working through the contested question of when the corps was founded, he then examines the idioms casting them as mothers, wives and daughters of the king, and the songs in which they claim war as their work and leave the farming to men.

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.

Scott opens with three complaints: a Qing surveyor beaten by the mountains of Guizhou, a British officer unable to pursue rebels into the Burmese hills, a missionary despairing of Appalachian heterodoxy. Each comes from someone trying to push order into country that would not accept it, and the relation between such projects and the zones that slip them is his subject. In mainland Southeast Asia he locates it in the region's deepest division, hill against valley, upstream against downstream.

Early states, on his account, were creatures of arable plains, built on sedentary grain farming and largely unfree labour, and the surrounding highlands were fiscally worthless to them: foraging, shifting cultivation, herding and fishing are hard to count and harder to appropriate. That periphery was also a standing temptation, a working alternative to life under a state, and those who fled into it were escaping the state itself. Scott treats the encounter as a global one.

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 general introduction reconstructs how Islamic history became a subject for European scholars. Medieval Christendom had built a badly distorted picture of Islam; the teaching of Arabic in early modern universities, the publication of texts by Dutch and English orientalists, and Pococke's compact survey of 1650 gradually displaced it, and by the time Gibbon gave nine chapters to the subject it stood alongside ancient and modern history.

The editors are candid about limits. Archives are thin, most chapters are political rather than social or economic because that is where sources and scholarship lie, and the work is offered as a report on present knowledge rather than a settled account.

The section printed here treats the Indian sub-continent: the Ghaznavid and Ghurid campaigns against the Hindu Shahi kingdoms, the sultanates that followed, and Mughal rule from Babur to Awrangzeb's wars with Rajputs and Marathas.

Domar revives an argument he found in Kliuchevsky's account of Muscovy and gives it a spare economic form. Where land is plentiful and labour scarce, land yields no rent: a hired man can walk off and farm for himself, so competition among employers pushes wages up to the value of what he produces and leaves the owner nothing.

A state that wants a class of landowners who do not work, as Russia wanted servitors able to equip themselves for war, cannot get one from market forces. Granting them exclusive title to land is not enough while peasants may still move. Only fixing labour in place ends the competition and lets the owner take everything above subsistence.

The hypothesis is stated as an incompatibility among three things, no two of which can coexist with the third. Domar concedes that government action is doing the decisive work, which leaves abundant land neither necessary nor sufficient for bondage.

Abi-Rached and Diwan reconstruct the public finances of Lebanon and the four Syrian states set up under the French Mandate between 1920 and 1943, building fiscal accounts out of the annual reports France was obliged to submit to the Permanent Mandates Commission. Education policy and educational outcomes in Lebanon receive the closest attention.

Three findings emerge. Revenue raised locally went largely toward France's army and its policing apparatus instead of infrastructure or social provision. Schooling and health care were left to private and missionary providers. The resulting private school system served Christians well and left the Muslim population badly underserved.

Set against French colonies elsewhere in Africa and Asia, the Mandate in Lebanon looks heavily taxed and thinly developed, with a smaller share of what was collected going toward development. The authors trace Lebanon's later privatization of basic social services to that missing public foundation.

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.

Jackson recovers a migration that has dropped out of two literatures at once. After Congolese independence in 1960 the United Nations recruited French-speaking professionals to staff the new state, and hundreds of Haitian teachers, engineers and doctors went. By 1962 they formed the second largest national contingent among UN experts there, with Haitians heading a UNESCO division, a WHO medical team and, by 1963, the ONUC military command.

Scholarship on postwar pan-Africanism, she argues, keeps to Ghana, Kenya and South Africa and carries an anglophone bias; where Haiti figures at all it is frozen at 1804, its bond with Africa taken as symbolic. Africa enters the study of Haitian migration mainly through epidemiologists and the discredited claim that returning Haitians brought AIDS to the United States.

Borrowing a phrase from Trouillot, Jackson calls this a failure of categories -- exile, brain drain and expatriate all mislead -- and asks what those silences do to the making of Haitian history.

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.

Compiled at the Army Geospatial Center in June 2010, months after the January earthquake, this reference work gathers citations on Haiti's geology, geography and earth sciences from an unusually wide spread of sources: scientific societies, government agencies, United Nations bodies, commercial databanks and major research library catalogues, with material drawn from agriculture, botany, engineering, soils, transportation, medicine and military science.

The compilers stress retrievability above completeness. Entries carry ISSN and ISBN details together with OCLC and Library of Congress control numbers, so that items can be borrowed or ordered through document delivery, and author contact details appear where possible so specialists could be reached during the emergency. They note how quickly scientific publishing from poorer countries goes out of print, and warn that place names vary in spelling across the languages in which the underlying surveys were conducted.

A long country profile precedes the citations, covering terrain and fisheries, deforestation, population and health, language, religion and the economy.

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.

Thomas Phipps Howard sailed from Southampton in February 1796 with Abercromby's expedition and kept a journal through two years in Saint-Domingue with the York Hussars. It is effectively the only record of him, and it stops in early 1798 at Port-au-Prince, before the evacuation.

The editorial matter places him inside the campaign that destroyed the British force. In ten days in July 1796 his regiment lost nearly a quarter of its strength to disease; penned into coastal towns and unable to fight inland, the army was reduced to covering its own withdrawal, which Maitland completed in 1798. Howard's value lies partly in what he could not see. He dismisses Toussaint's soldiers as brigands, and the sympathy for the enslaved he brought with him did not survive contact with an enemy who killed his comrades. Introductory chapters cover Toussaint's training and discipline of his troops, the regiment's history, and conditions aboard the transports.

Filan writes for readers outside Haiti who want to serve the lwa on their own, and he is candid about the ceiling: no book makes anyone a houngan or mambo, and a serious student will eventually need a societé and a teacher.

The advice is practical and cautionary. The lwa are presented as powerful and easily offended rather than as forces to be summoned on demand; taboos are to be kept, the hotter spirits left to the experienced, and a space cleansed beforehand so that tricksters cannot pass themselves off as spirits or ancestors. Bad luck, in this reading, signals neglect rather than any danger in the involvement itself.

An opening section places the religion inside Haitian history — ceremonies suppressed under slavery, Freemasonry's mark on the secret societies, Makandal and Boukman — before later parts explain who does what at a ceremony and give instructions for shrines, offerings, vessels and the individual lwa a beginner may safely approach.

Fieldwork carried out in 1956–57 in the mountain commune of Kenscoff, an hour above Port-au-Prince, and long acquaintance with the same families going back to 1937, underpin this account of how peasant households there are formed, housed and broken up.

Two kinds of union coexist and collide. Plasaj, a stable customary arrangement that may involve more than one wife, has no standing in law, which treats it as concubinage and grants the plasé wife no claim on her partner's property; legal marriage confers rights that practice frequently overrides in her favor, with public opinion behind it.

The older container for all this was the laku, a cluster of households under a father, elder brother or uncle who held the land and whose word on marriage was final. It persists in the higher districts toward Furcy but has thinned near the bourg, which the road opened in 1932 turned into a summer resort.

Herskovits opens by refusing two commonplaces: that Africa slumbered in isolation until Europe arrived, and that nothing of economic consequence was ever domesticated south of the Sahara. Agronomists had already traced rice, sorghum, several millets, yams and the oil palm to West African origins. The continent, he insists, gave as well as received in the long exchange that made the Old World.

That correction sets up his complaint about postwar research. Studies of industrialisation, cities, schools, mines and new political parties concentrated on institutions and on what came from outside, losing sight of Africans themselves and of the habits of doing, behaving and valuing that turned out to have far more staying power than talk of detribalization allowed.

Written as colonial rule was ending, the book uses cultural anthropology to hold conservatism and change together, treating the revolutions that produced independence as continuities rather than breaks with the past.

San Miguel reads Dominican historical writing as narrative, asking not whether its authors got their facts right but what their stories were built to accomplish. Taking a cue from Hayden White, he looks for the recurring plots — tragic ones above all — that turn up across writers of different centuries and opposed political camps, and treats their errors as constituent parts of a text's meaning rather than as blemishes to be corrected.

The essays move through a sequence of figures. An eighteenth-century chronicler urges the Spanish crown to expand the slave trade so Santo Domingo might rival prosperous Saint-Domingue, and defends the racial purity of a colonial elite he claims descent from. A nineteenth-century writer locates the country's real strength in tobacco-growing peasants and treats racial mixture as an asset. A founding national historian's liberalism and nationalism pull against each other over the conquest. Twentieth-century figures bring historiography and state power together.

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.

Traditions that look ancient are often recent, and Hobsbawm's introduction sets out why they get manufactured and what their manufacture reveals.

Living custom, he argues, needs no inventing; where the old ways still work, nobody has to revive them. Invention occurs when continuity with the past is asserted rather than inherited — sometimes grafted onto an existing practice, more often assembled from the stock of ritual, symbol and moral exhortation that religion, princely display, folklore and freemasonry left lying about. Swiss nationalism supplies the example: folksong, marksmanship and physical contests reworked into federal festivals with flags, processions, gun salutes and patriotic choirs, all in the idiom of improvement.

He sorts these inventions into three overlapping kinds — those that bind a group, those that legitimate authority and status, and those that instil belief and value — and treats them as symptoms, evidence of strains a society would not otherwise be seen to have.

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.