Swedish readers followed the Haitian Revolution closely. Thomasson notes that Stockholms Posten reported on it twice a week, that Toussaint Louverture's name appeared in its pages 178 times between 1802 and 1804, and that opinion in the capital ran mostly against colonialism.

Commerce followed the coverage. During the 1810s Stockholm sent men out to sell weapons to independent Haiti, and what they wrote adds to the record of those years. An account from 1821 describes the collapse of Henri Christophe's kingdom in the north; a tract from 1819 argues fiercely for decolonizing the Caribbean. Swedish and French merchants alike worked around the French blockade by trading under Sweden's flag through its Caribbean colony of Saint Barthélemy.

By that decade Sweden had set aside territorial ambition in favor of trade with the new American states. Thomasson reads the whole record, up to recognition in 1825, as further evidence that Haiti's isolation after independence has been overstated.

The protest cry setting the children of Petion against the children of Dessalines still circulates in Haitian political life. Mocombe asks where it came from, using the structurationist and structural Marxist account of consciousness he calls phenomenological structuralism.

The slogan is usually heard in racial terms, with Petion standing for the neoliberal outlook of the mulatto elite and Dessalines for the economic reform and social justice voiced by the African masses. Mocombe's suggestion is that the two figures now function as categories of class struggle within a capitalist world-system under American hegemony, and that the African majority, the children of Sans Souci, bears the cost.

Payton approaches the Duvalier decades through what got built. Clearing slums, laying transport infrastructure, and the business and politics of cement in Port-au-Prince supply the evidence for a fresh account of how place was made in a Caribbean capital between 1957 and 1986.

The argument runs both ways. How the city was built lodged the regime's politics, its economy, and its social order in physical form; the changes to that fabric then worked back on the dictatorship's own unstable inner life. Construction figures as part of how the regime operated, not as scenery behind it.

Payton offers the result as a new way of writing the history of place in the Caribbean, and sets its intertwined threads in a longer frame as well: power distributed unevenly across the country's protracted movement from slavery toward freedom.

Two estates on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue supply the subject: Haut-du-Cap, where Toussaint was born around 1745, and its larger sister plantation at Plaine-du-Nord. Geggus begins by testing what is actually known about his connection to them.

Documents published in 1977 show him already free by the 1770s, owning a slave and renting land at Grande-Rivière, which sits badly with the many contemporaries who took him for a slave in 1791 and with the silence of the estates' own correspondence. Geggus proposes that Bayon de Libertat bought and freed him before becoming the absentee count's attorney, and that Toussaint stayed nearby, perhaps supervising during Bayon's absences.

The second half turns from the man to the people around him. Both estates were unusually African, with Africans making up three-quarters of the adult population at Haut-du-Cap, and their age, sex and origin profiles are set beside those of the surrounding sugar plantations on the eve of the revolt.

Mayes and Jayaram introduce a collection built around a single proposition: Haiti and the Dominican Republic should be studied as one interconnected island rather than as two national cases. They trace how research shifted after the 1990s, as both economies moved from agriculture toward export processing and tourism, both saw poverty fall hardest on women, and both came to depend on money sent home from abroad.

Their framework revises transnationalism in three ways. It insists that those who stay are as much part of the story as those who leave, and asks what keeps particular people in place. It denies that cross-border movement is recent, following Trouillot in dating Caribbean entanglement with global capital to 1492.

And it argues that Hispaniola exemplifies the transnational distinctively, through the spread of republicanism, nineteenth-century antillanismo, and a shared twentieth-century history of American occupation and economic dependence.

Mintz asks, seriously rather than rhetorically, whether enslaved people on Caribbean sugar estates can usefully be called proletarians, and refuses a quick answer in either direction. His starting point is Marx's distinction between formal freedom and the sale of labour-power, which makes clear that a free labourer is not automatically a member of the proletariat.

Slavery, he insists, varied too much by colony, crop, period and demography for a single characterisation to hold; his own discussion narrows to the sugar estates of the Antilles across four centuries. What the enslaved shared with wage workers was subordination to a capitalist world market; what they lacked was any freedom to sell their labour at all.

Following Wallerstein, he suggests the two categories only make sense in relation to the whole system that produced both, and closes less with a verdict than with a warning that the terms themselves, and the adjectives free and unfree, are abstractions in need of repair.

Maya Deren traveled to Haiti in the 1950s and was initiated as a manbo. Daniels uses her case to ask what it means when white North Americans convert to religions long practiced almost entirely by people of color — a question she approaches through Vodou's own cosmology, in which the dead come to rest in Afrik-Ginen, an underwater homeland described as the legendary site of racial origin but never expressly closed to whites.

The essay sets out a working theory of whiteness, then treats the earlier history of North American conversion to Buddhism as a precedent for white initiation into African diasporic traditions. Deren's standing as an immigrant artist, Daniels argues, gave her a sideways relation to whiteness and let her understand the journey to Haiti as a homecoming. What she entered was a system of ritual kinship whose obligations reached well past the boundaries of the living.

Celeste builds an essay around a figure she names the wailing black woman: the mourning mother whose public grief is offered as evidence of injustice. The starting point is Rihanna singing about wanting to scream, which Celeste hears as an expression of frustration shared by black women across the diaspora whose footing with the state and society remains insecure.

The essay tracks how that figure has been represented over time before settling on the reality series The First 48, which films victims' relatives at their rawest. Celeste takes up sociologist Herman Gray's invitation to examine what media images make audiences feel, treating the sentiment that collects around coverage of people of color as a form of labor.

Two questions organize the argument: how the wailing woman is enlisted in familiar stories about black death, criminality, and citizenship, and what her affective labor might disrupt. She appears both as a warning the program issues and as a potentially oppositional figure.

Perry traces a long line of Haitian indigenist thought and treats it as an alternative to diaspora as a way of framing Caribbean identity.

Two periods anchor the argument: the war of independence, and the cultural movement of the 1920s that formed in opposition to the United States occupation. In both, indigenous rhetoric was about sovereignty. It grounded claims to territory in descent, and it defined certain people as foreign and demanded their removal.

The term indigene, Perry argues, marked a position taken up against an imperial power more often than it named any fixed set of cultural traits, which makes the claim political rather than essentialist. Examining how this rhetoric imagined a relation to the island's aboriginal Taino, the essay sets out what a discourse attempting to root Africans and their descendants in the space of the New World could do, where it fell short, and where it contradicted itself.

Georges Biassou reached St. Augustine in 1796 at fifty-five, having led rebel forces early in the Haitian Revolution, joined Spain's Black Auxiliaries when Madrid offered freedom and military rank, and stayed loyal to the crown even after France declared general emancipation. When the Treaty of Basel forced the unit's dissolution, he and a household of twenty-four — relatives, dependents, fellow soldiers, a few slaves — were moved by way of Cuba to Spanish Florida.

Johnson's contribution is to read him as a product of French Saint-Domingue rather than as a revolutionary. Biassou had negotiated for the freedom of the rebel leadership, not for the abolition of slavery, and remained a royalist by conviction; officials who feared he would import insurrection had misjudged the man, if not the moment, since Pointe Coupée had risen the year before. His awkward position in Florida exposes how differently French and Spanish colonies handled free people of colour.

Sepinwall asks what place C. L. R. James's 1938 study still holds among specialists in the Haitian Revolution, at a moment when the book is being rediscovered by Caribbean theorists, British readers on the left, and even American venture capitalists. Its long dominance, she suggests, was less a compliment to James than an indictment of a field Anglophone historians had largely abandoned.

Tracing the book's early reception and then setting it against work published since the 1990s, she finds a mixed inheritance. Scholars still credit James with insisting that the enslaved freed themselves, and one of them was pushed toward the study of ordinary insurgents by James himself. But newer research in notarial and court records has complicated his portraits of free people of color, his weighting of class over race, and his near-silence on women. The field, on her account, no longer needs a single book to stand in for it.

One sugar plantation on the plain outside Port-au-Prince, and the aristocratic family that owned it, carry Cheney's account of what French colonial capitalism actually was. The Ferronnays papers, seized when family members emigrated after 1789, contain 220 letters from Jean-Baptiste Corbier, the manager on the ground, and an unusually reflective correspondent for this kind of source.

Saint-Domingue was the most advanced experiment mercantile capitalism had yet managed, but Cheney shows it growing out of Old Regime France rather than away from it: crown, nobility and merchants working together, privileges reshuffled rather than markets freed, sugar barons crowding out planters of modest origins until the coffee boom opened a cheaper door for petits blancs and gens de couleur.

Corbier's misgivings about cruelty and its waste can be stitched into something resembling abolitionism, but Cheney calls that an optical illusion. The story runs to 1838, since for the family the place remained Saint-Domingue.

Seasonal labor migration from Haiti to Cuba sits at the center of how the early twentieth-century Caribbean is narrated, in questions of race, of national development, and of United States imperial power. Casey reconstructs what that migration was actually like for the workers who undertook it.

Following them between rural and urban Haiti and the sugar plantations, coffee farms, and cities of eastern Cuba, the study fills a substantial gap and offers a close view of how empire, labor, and political economy operated day to day in both countries.

Migrants were not simply moved around by these forces. Their attempts to improve the conditions in which they lived and worked, and to keep practicing their religions, left marks on migration policy, on economic life, on how race was understood, and on Caribbean spiritual practice, in a period when Haiti and Cuba were each living under United States domination.

A photograph of Jean Price-Mars sitting across from Nelson Rockefeller at the Haitian-American Institute in 1944 opens Verna's account of the decade or so after the occupation ended. She uses it to unsettle a historiography organised around American domination and Haitian resistance, arguing that the pairing is too blunt to explain what educated Haitians were actually doing.

From the late 1930s into the late 1940s, officials, intellectuals and members of the professional class actively sought American scholarships, expertise and institutional partnerships, expecting gains in status, in public health and schooling, and in Haiti's standing abroad. They were not a united group: indigenistes, Francophiles, socialists and admirers of the United States pursued incompatible ends through the same channels.

Verna's claim is that Haitians helped shape inter-American affairs rather than merely absorbing them, and that these years offer a case where outcomes were not settled in advance.

A large body of research ties organizational effectiveness to leadership; another ties it to culture. What has been missing, Jacques argues, is any account of how the two operate together when an organization is failing, and which of them weighs more heavily. No study had examined the question in the Haitian community at all.

Haitian churches serve as the site. Working phenomenologically, Jacques gathers detailed accounts from eighteen people who belong or once belonged to four congregations in Boston and nearby cities in the northeastern United States, examining organizational structure from the inside through what members have lived.

Culture shapes how these churches function, but leadership proves the dominant influence on how well or badly they do. Their inability to grow and thrive, Jacques concludes, comes down to leaders whose mentality has not evolved with the times; remedying it means deliberately building the right infrastructure and getting proper leadership training.

Pressley-Sanon assembles her account of Haiti from oral stories and visual art gathered on the island and in two African countries she treats as its motherlands.

The aim is recovery — histories that have gone under the surface — and the means are drawn from Haiti's own deep spiritual and cultural traditions, which supply the book its method rather than merely its material.

Maya Deren, the Ukrainian American filmmaker who went to Haiti in the 1950s and was initiated as a manbo in Vodou, is the case at the center of this essay. Daniels asks what drew her to the religion, how she built ties with other devotees, and what her path suggests about white North Americans who take up traditions practiced mainly by people of color.

Getting there requires some theoretical work on whiteness itself, and Daniels reads earlier North American conversions to Buddhism as a precedent for white entry into African Diasporic religions. Deren's position as an immigrant and an artist, on this account, gave her a slanted relationship to whiteness and let her cast the trip to Haiti as a return home.

The essay concludes that Deren was absorbed into a system of ritual kinship whose ties extended past the limits of the living world.

In Cap-Français, white residents watched nonwhite people move about the city and saw subversion. Joseph-Gabriel argues that such movement, whether walking the streets or carrying on trade and economic exchange, amounted to a claim on freedom, and that it was read that way by those who held power.

The essay follows three groups in Le Cap: Black prisoners, free Black property owners, and the traders who worked the city's racially marked market spaces. For each, getting about was a way of contesting where authority lay and who belonged where. On the eve of the Haitian Revolution, that movement registered to white observers as a loosening of the social and political order on which the slave society rested.

Lahens tells the story of one Haitian family across four generations, all of them living under and struggling against a curse. The writing is lyrical and the mood haunted; the novel has been recognized with awards.

Growing out of a symposium convened at Duke in 2015 on the eve of Fèt Gede, this introduction sets out what its editors mean by walking together. Mache ansanm is borrowed from Vodou, where lwa are said to walk with their devotees and related spirits are grouped as variations on a shared principle; the editors extend it to protection claimed by occupying space, to transnational friendship and material support, and to a collectivity that does not rest on shared identity.

Queer functions here as an invitation rather than a category, since Haitian genders and sexualities resist imported nomenclature. The frame is tested against events the editors lived through: a Port-au-Prince memorial for the dead of the Pulse shooting, Hurricane Matthew's destruction of the Grand'Anse, and the threats that forced a Haitian cultural foundation to cancel an Afro-Caribbean LGBT film festival and shut its doors for weeks.

Thompson and Magnan ask what makes an NGO livestock scheme work. Handing animals to poor rural households has become standard practice for organizations fighting poverty among smallholders in low-income countries, yet evidence on whether such asset transfers deliver is only beginning to accumulate.

Their case is a program in rural Haiti that gave recipients goats along with training. Long-run aims such as better health, schooling, housing and farm output all depend on a prior step: recipients must build herds that stay healthy and reproduce. The authors measure herd health and growth across households, then regress those outcomes on household characteristics to test predictions drawn from work on asset-based poverty.

Wealthier recipients, they find, end up with smaller and less valuable herds than poorer ones. Location matters for herd growth, access to land sharply lowers the death rate among kids, and weaker evidence suggests women lose fewer. If the pattern holds elsewhere, NGOs gain criteria for choosing whom to enroll.

Sweet's research note opens not with Kongo but with a French colonist. Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozières landed at Norfolk, Virginia, on February 26, 1794, after a four-month crossing from Le Havre that began in a storm and never improved.

Worse had come earlier. Two years before, with the revolution just under way, Baudry found his wife and daughter wandering in the woods of Saint-Domingue, driven from their home by rebels. He was an officer, wounded near Léogane, and most of the men under his command were killed. He fled the colony in March 1792, met briefly in Paris with his brother-in-law, the writer Moreau de Saint-Méry, and was soon exiled again, settling in Philadelphia.

There he worked as clerk, bookseller, and editor. He traveled North America, spent time with relatives in New Orleans, and recast himself as an authority on the natural history of the French colonies, lecturing to the American Philosophical Society and publishing on scientific subjects.

Subsistence, not profit, is the axis on which Scott builds his account of peasant politics in colonial Southeast Asia. A cultivating household is a unit of consumption before it is one of production, and the fear of falling below a survival threshold explains choices that look irrational by ordinary accounting: scattered strips, several seed varieties, punishing labour for tiny gains.

Village institutions extended the same logic outward. Redistributed common land, obligations laid on the well-off, patron-client ties and reciprocity all worked as rough insurance, and because they were experienced as rights, their breach produced a sense of injustice rather than mere hardship.

Commercialised agriculture and the fiscal demands of the colonial state stripped that insurance away in Burma and Vietnam, while fixed rents and head taxes shifted risk onto those least able to carry it. The revolts Scott examines he reads as the protests of consumers, backward-looking demands that an older bargain be honoured.

White opens with Lincoln's funeral train carrying the body home to Springfield, and with the question the mourning left unsettled: who exactly counted as the People whom the assassin could not kill. Not everyone grieved, and the demand for vengeance narrowed quickly from the South at large to the conspirators.

From there the book treats the three decades to 1896 as a single project rather than a failure followed by an excess. Reconstruction belongs, on this reading, to a longer effort at building a nation on the model Henry Clay had urged — federal money, federal improvements, institutions on a continental scale — an effort ambitious in conception and often unlucky in execution.

Measured against the ideal it began with, a country of self-reliant households in small Protestant towns, what actually arrived was corporations of unprecedented size, troops at Homestead and Pullman, a class of industrial magnates, a Republican party in their service, and the abandonment of racial equality.