Forsdick and Høgsbjerg open their account of the man later called Toussaint Louverture with a caution about evidence. He was born enslaved sometime in the early 1740s; the precise date will probably never be established, and the surviving stories of his childhood contradict one another or cannot be checked, which points to legend as their source.

Rather than adjudicate those claims immediately, the chapter turns first to the setting that shaped him, Saint-Domingue as it was when he was born, and reaches back to Columbus's landing on Hispaniola in 1492 to begin that account. The passage available here breaks off at that point.

Nessler treats the Haitian Revolution as an event that covered the whole island of Hispaniola and reached across the Caribbean, rather than one confined to French territory.

The book sets the history of Saint-Domingue, which became Haiti, next to that of Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic, and shows how thoroughly the two were entangled. Neither the line between them nor the question of who governed what was as settled as later maps suggest, and developments on each side shaped the other.

Historians from Thornton to Dubois have suggested that Saint-Domingue's late-century influx of West Central African captives, many of them soldiers taken in the Kongo civil wars, helped make the 1791 insurrection possible. Davis tests that claim comparatively rather than restating it.

Working from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, he charts the regional origins of captives landed across the French Caribbean — Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana and the smaller colonies alongside Saint-Domingue — and finds that only in Saint-Domingue did West Central Africans come to outnumber every other group by a wide margin, and only after mid-century, as Senegambia stabilized and the Kongo did not. Since Saint-Domingue was also the one French colony to produce a general slave revolt, he treats the overlap as strengthening the case. He is candid about the limit: the database records where captives were bought, not where they came from, so the argument leans on other evidence to close that gap.

Lacet asks what allowed Haitian women who lived through the 2010 earthquake to recover, starting from two obstacles: research on Haitian mental health is scarce, and a term like resilience does not travel cleanly between cultures.

The design is qualitative, built to describe rather than measure. It follows women displaced by the disaster who had to make a life in unfamiliar surroundings while carrying grief and loss, asking what actually helped them do it. What emerges is that the women's perseverance rested on values and strengths they already carried from their own culture.

Convened for the centenary of the July 1915 landing, this roundtable brings Bellegarde-Smith, Dupuy, Fatton and Renda together, with St. Jacques and Sommers moderating, to ask what left Haiti open to occupation and what nineteen years of American rule bequeathed.

Much of the exchange concerns the nineteenth century. Dupuy describes a ruling class split between the old affranchi proprietors and a newer black landed group, an indemnity paid to France, Boyer's failed attempt to force cultivators back onto plantations, and the resulting opening for foreign commercial and financial capital. Renda reads the same refusal of plantation labour as an achievement, pointing to the lakou, to ritual practice, to storytelling and music as things peasants built instead.

The participants then connect the racial arguments that justified intervention, including the charge that Haitians could not govern themselves or cultivate their land, to present-day talk of failed states and humanitarian protection. They close on deforestation and its consequences.

Schuller's book comes out of an independent study of eight camps for people displaced by Haiti's earthquake, from which more than 150 interviews were gathered. Those interviewed ranged from earthquake survivors living in the camps to Haitian front-line staff and camp managers to foreign aid personnel.

What the account documents is a gap between the size of the response, running to billions of dollars, and what it produced on the ground. The relief effort did not merely fall short; it set off consequences no one intended, tearing at established social and cultural arrangements and driving violence upward, with women absorbing much of it.

Because the testimony comes from several positions inside the same operation at once, the same events can be viewed from the camps and from the agencies that were meant to be serving them.

Toussaint Louverture's constitution of 1801 is usually filed as an authoritarian embarrassment. Ardouin called it tyrannical, Madiou a lie, and Fischer does not deny that it hands one man enormous power. She argues it is nonetheless a document of real interest for the history of rights.

Her case rests on how the text words its prohibition. France in 1795 had recast the ban as a limit on contract, something nobody may do to himself. The colonial text names slaves directly, puts their protection ahead of any general principle, and recasts the opening of the 1789 Declaration as a sequence of verbs: to be born, to live, to die, all of it free, all of it French, all of it here. Entitlement comes unhooked from birthplace, turning the colony into a refuge.

Rights here belong to an inhabitant rather than an abstract citizen, and the shift registers a history of transportation and death that abstraction had smoothed away.

Thomas approaches Sylvia Wynter's manuscript "Black Metamorphosis" from two directions at once, as a study of maroonage and as an instance of it. The starting point is a line from Aimé Césaire, "Marronnons-nous," let us maroon, which Thomas treats as a neglected instruction and uses to track what Césaire's thinking meant for Wynter across the span of her career.

The claim that follows is double. Read on its own terms, the manuscript contributes to scholarship on maroonage in the narrow, conventional sense. But it also pushes past that sense, refusing to leave maroonage fixed as a bounded empirical reference to be catalogued.

Wynter's own phrase, "species of maroonage," gives Thomas his measure, and the essay counts the manuscript itself as one of those species: a sweeping political undertaking of African and diasporic resistance with anchor points across the Americas.

For a state no other government would recognize, print was not decoration but diplomacy. Garraway examines the earliest published writing of independent Haiti, and particularly of Henry Christophe's northern kingdom, as a sustained attempt to make sovereignty real by declaring it in public.

Benedict Anderson's account of nations imagined through vernacular print fits Haiti badly, she argues: literacy was limited and the audience that mattered lay outside the country's borders. Haitian writers addressed foreign readers, argued their case in the terms of international law and of Enlightenment and Christian morality, and insisted not on Haiti's difference but on its equality with European states. In a country of former captives whose enslavement had been justified by an alleged incapacity for letters, publishing was itself an act of defiance.

Such writing also reached past the nation, speaking for people of African descent everywhere, and it had first to conjure the public it addressed.

Marking a hundred years since United States marines landed in 1915, Sommers and Delices examine the economic interests, racial assumptions, and hard-power calculations that ran through American dealings with Haiti before the occupation began.

Rather than asking whether the United States as a whole profited from empire, a framing they set aside as exhausted, the study asks who in particular gained and how much power those people had to shape policy. It also presses on what the state actually is when foreign policy is made.

Two figures get close attention: Woodrow Wilson, whose racial thinking is dissected alongside his decision to intervene, and Admiral William Caperton, whose conduct reveals the attitudes that let military commanders carry out an occupation. The lens then widens to the American press, read here as a promoter of commercial opportunity. Taken together, the chapters answer why, by whom, and how empire was pursued in this case.

A collection of poems by Georges, Boston's poet laureate, working in African American letters.

The praise the book carries comes from the poet Afaa Michael Weaver, who hears in it a fresh account of where poetry begins, and an intelligence careful enough to step across light lying on water. Weaver describes the poems as language choosing its own form, moving through history that has not been spoken, and taking up the space where music leaves off and poetry arrives to name what lasts and what belongs only to the moment.

Accounts of the Age of Revolution have long centered on France and the thirteen colonies. Gaffield's volume joins a growing case for treating what happened in Haiti as the third of the era's world-shaping events.

That revolution was the only slave uprising ever to succeed, and the declaration it produced in 1804 marks a break in how social, economic and political life would afterward be arranged. It brought a second independent country into being in the Americas, and it established a new kind of political text.

For all the weight now given to Haiti internationally, the declaration itself has only recently begun to receive close attention: the circumstances of its making, its actual wording, and what followed from it.

Dillon and Drexler bring together work on what the Haitian Revolution meant for the young United States, reading the upheaval in the colony against the country's own early development.

Emigration, Laguerre argues, does not simply drain a nation; it redistributes it. He proposes the cosmonation, a nation whose homeland and its diasporic settlements together form a single crossborder social formation, as a way past both methodological nationalism and loose talk about the nation's disappearance.

Nations are sorted first by shape: monoterritorial ones with a single homeland and a dispersed diaspora, multiterritorial ones assembled through colonisation, annexation or merger. Either can become multisite, and the book follows how such entities are built and held together through migrant associations, expanded consular services, diasporic representation in homeland parliaments, and digital media.

The evidence comes from interviews with French, Italian and Croatian migrants in the United States, with comparative material from Turkish, Greek, Haitian and Armenian informants, alongside content analysis of association and government websites. Crossborder immigrant organisations, operating in several sites at once and sometimes partnered with states, serve as the clearest case.

Burnard and Garrigus set the two largest slave societies of the eighteenth-century Caribbean side by side and argue that what they shared mattered more than the empires governing them. Sugar planters in both treated enslaved people at once as workers and as unusually liquid capital, to be sold, pledged as security or hired out, an outlook the authors read as of a piece with the emerging mentality of industrial and financial capitalism.

Technology followed from that logic rather than resisting it. There was no reason to mechanize planting while cane still had to be cut by hand, but after 1750 planters grew keenly interested in anything that raised estate profits, and gang labour already made a machine of the cutter.

The pairing is deliberate. Rather than a formal comparison in the Tannenbaum tradition, which foundered on the difficulty of defining treatment, the book gives a paired portrait of two societies moving down parallel tracks.

Mocombe works from a framework he names phenomenological structuralism, an adaptation of structuration theory, to argue that Vodou supplied Haiti's rural majority with a working set of values: collective living, egalitarian and democratic instincts, openness to outsiders, a sense of balance and of justice among them.

Carried by oungan, manbo, gangan and the granmoun, that outlook produced what he calls the Haitian spirit of communism and sustained in the mountains and the provinces what Jean Casimir calls the counter-plantation system.

Set against it stands a rival ethic, Catholic and Protestant in inspiration and capitalist in aim, held by whites, by the mulatto and gens de couleur elite, and by the free black petite bourgeoisie. Mocombe's charge is that the affranchis who lived by that second ethic hollowed out the independence movement the Vodou practitioners had begun, and that the result was the poorest, most racist and most tyrannical state in the hemisphere.

From colonial Saint-Domingue in the seventeenth century to Haiti after independence, Vodou has been rendered in Haitian thought as something unsettling and paradoxical, in literature, law, politics, history, painting, music, and art alike. Cleophat and Joseph collect chapters arguing that the rival accounts arising from these domains have not merely touched Haitian life but supplied its cosmology and its way of seeing.

Vodou's reach, on this account, extends into Haitian intellectual, aesthetic, and literary imagination, into social ethics, and into thinking about sexuality, gender, and theology, as in Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Roumain, and others. It also shapes how memory, trauma, collective redemption, and diasporic identity are handled by Haitian women writers, Edwidge Danticat and Myriam Chancy among them.

The contributors come from many fields, ethnomusicology and performance through anthropology, economics, philosophy, and theology, and work from queer, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic positions.

Cleophat and Joseph open from a complaint: scholarship on Vodou has largely treated it as something that sprang up in Saint-Domingue on its own, without African antecedents, and has said little about its debt to Yoruba religion. The collection is built to close that gap.

Its chapters compare Vodou with African traditions, Yoruba and Egyptian religion among them, on the argument that shared patterns of belief and ritual can be read as evidence of continuity between the continent and its diaspora, and can clarify Vodou's mythology and practice.

The editors also insist that Vodou be read across borders and cultures, and in the political and economic circumstances that produced competing versions of it. Contributors come from ethnomusicology, performance studies, anthropology and other fields, and work with feminist, queer, Marxist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic frameworks, building a composite account of how the religion has shaped Haitian self-understanding.

Eller opens with a felled palm: the Tree of Liberty planted in Santo Domingo under Boyer and toppled by unknown hands one night in 1864. From it she works outward into a history that refuses to treat the island's two halves as separate stories.

Her subject is the Dominican war against Spanish reannexation after 1861 and the rural people who fought it. A tiny lettered elite, contemptuous of a peasantry descended partly from maroons, left them almost undocumented; they lived by woodcutting, hunting, livestock and honey, largely outside the reach of any state, and held to a rough equality, to decision-making in their own communities, and above all to land and subsistence. Fear of re-enslavement raced through the territory, and whole families abandoned and burned their towns rather than submit.

Haitians helped them repeatedly, their own survival being at stake. That solidarity, Eller argues, later national narratives worked hard to erase.

Harris Lifschitz, an American who grew rich in Haiti between 1898 and his murder in 1921, serves Casey as a lens on US imperialism. His career shows how foreigners already operating in Haiti before the occupation moved into more profitable ventures once the Americans took control.

It also shows how patchy the occupation's state building was. Centralization went only so far: pockets of local autonomy survived and land titles were kept badly. Lifschitz stripped Haitians of property by pressing cases in Haitian courts, which lay outside US authority, by working the gaps in land administration, and by exploiting the occupation's habit of enforcing laws to the letter.

The case also unsettles any clean division between occupier and occupied. Marines first accused him of corruption they called Haitian; Haitians treated him as empire's instrument. He later borrowed the vocabulary and cross-border networks of the opposition movement, and some activists came to portray him as a martyr.

When US marines came ashore in Haiti in 1915, they began an occupation whose damage outlasted its end in 1934. Scholarship on how African Americans resisted Haiti's loss of sovereignty is well developed, Byrd notes, but it has centered on Black men and the institutions they ran, leaving Black women's responses thinly drawn.

Byrd recovers those responses and finds them mixed. Some prominent Black women went on describing Haiti as a place in need of civilizing. Others founded organizations that grew out of imperial language and at times leaned on imperial machinery to function.

Middle-class and elite Black women, in this account, were working through a shifting moment in Black intellectual life, holding to older ideas of uplift and respectability while also demanding Haitian freedom in radical terms. The article treats that combination as an opening into Black political culture, women's organizing, and American empire.

Daut picks up a line of argument running through Ronald Paulson, Lynn Hunt, and Françoise Vergès, each of whom has found oedipal structures in the way revolution gets represented, whether in writing, in images, or in politics. Victor Séjour's story "Le Mulâtre" has already supplied one instance.

Hunt's explanation for the pattern is historical before it is psychological. Eighteenth-century Europeans were in the habit of picturing a ruler as a father and a nation as a family enlarged, which made such metaphors ready to hand. Under the ancien régime, on her account, ordinary French people could scarcely conceive of revolution except as the overthrow of a father-king. From that premise the chapter moves to a comparison.