Independence in 1804 left Haiti's leaders with a survival problem: the new nation needed strong ties to other states. They looked hardest at the United States, home to a sizeable free black population that included vocal champions of emigration and colonization. Through the 1820s, President Jean-Pierre Boyer helped move thousands of black Americans to Haiti, promising land, commercial opportunity and, above all, a black state.

The appeal reached opposed constituencies. Black community leaders and journalists presented emigration as a way to resist discrimination and prove the race an equal on the world stage; antislavery whites wanted to support a nation founded by liberated slaves; businessmen of both races saw trade; racist whites saw a way to export America's race problem.

Migration ebbed by the decade's end as emigrants found the republic was no black Eden. Fanning reconstructs the campaign's rise and fall from letters, diaries, travellers' reports, newspapers and American, British and French consular records.

Where sewers cannot be laid and pit latrines will not work, one option is to catch waste in sealed containers and haul it away to a treatment site. Tilmans and colleagues report on a pilot of that arrangement, delivered to households in Cap Haitien.

Their measurements cover a densely built informal settlement: how much excreta the population produces in a week, what share of it is safely carried off by household and shared container toilets, and what the operation costs. Unmanaged faeces dropped by roughly three and a half times, and among households on the service, open defecation and bagged waste thrown into the street all but disappeared.

Costs ran above those of conventional piped sewerage at scale, though the authors expect that gap to narrow as such services grow. They end by weighing what it would take for planners and policymakers to treat container systems as one of the standard choices available to fast-growing cities.

Curtis and Mucher introduce the first English version of Haiti's earliest novel, written in exile on Saint Thomas by Emeric Bergeaud and published in Paris in 1859, a year after his death; his relative Beaubrun Ardouin arranged the printing, and the book never appeared in Haiti itself.

Bergeaud told his readers he had taken care not to disfigure history. His characters are invented, but the story they carry is the colony's transformation into an independent nation, related as a bloody and just fight whose sacrifice later generations are charged to remember. He wanted the appeal of fiction to reach people who would never study the annals, and he wanted to answer the hostile portraits of his country then in circulation.

The editors note that the little scholarship there is has dismissed the novel as derivative of French models, and argue that both the dismissals and the book deserve a fresh look.

A movement built on the demand for black self-determination might seem to have had little to offer a country independent since 1804. Plummer shows why the American occupation changed the equation. Marines landed in 1915 and stayed two decades, importing segregation and fighting a guerrilla war in the countryside, while at Versailles the United States helped block a clause against racial discrimination.

Opposition converged from unexpected directions. James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP wrote to Marcus Garvey in 1920 urging him to condemn the intervention — a collaboration scholars have assumed the rivalry between them ruled out — and the UNIA had in fact already taken up the cause. What Garveyism offered in Haiti, Plummer argues, was a language for valuing Vodou, Creole and rural custom and for widening political participation. Few in number, Haitian Garveyites nonetheless fed the indigenist current and the middle-class politics that outlasted the occupation.

Gaffield reconstructs Haiti's first years of independence through its dealings with Britain, France, the United States, Denmark and the Batavian Republic, and finds far more contact than the familiar picture of total isolation allows. The Atlantic wars of the period structured those dealings: belligerent powers and neutral ones operated under different customary rules, which gave Britain a latitude in approaching Haitian leaders that Washington, Copenhagen and Amsterdam did not have.

Much of the argument concerns evidence. Haitian repositories hold little from these years, having suffered disaster, underfunding, political upheaval and theft, and scholars have read that silence as proof of abandonment. Following one document to the next from Paris to Jamaica, London, Washington, the Netherlands and Denmark, Gaffield assembles parliamentary and congressional debate, diplomatic and merchant letters, and court records instead.

What emerges is local agents improvising policy toward Dessalines, Petion and Christophe with little direction from home, and merchants shaping decisions that racism alone cannot explain.

Kaisary takes up the 1801 Constitution of Saint-Domingue, promulgated by Toussaint Louverture, and treats it as a document both complex and contradictory.

The reading proposed runs it through the work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. The abstract available for this record breaks off there, so the argument's development cannot be reported further.

Makandal escaping as a bird, a Macoute leaving jail as a dog, Cacos evading the Marines in animal form: shape-shifting has long served in Haiti as a story about sovereignty held onto under occupation. Derby asks where such techniques came from, and answers that they were not purely African inheritances. Sorcery, she argues, worked partly by capturing the aura of the foreign.

Two episodes carry the case. The lougawou or baka, usually traced to West African secret societies, also draws on French country lore about demonic animals; and the occultism circulating during the American occupation of 1915 to 1934 left its mark, up to and including US Marines installed in the pantheon as fearsome lwa. Built on shape-shifter narratives gathered in Haiti and the Dominican Republic between 2008 and 2013, the essay describes a traffic in otherness that sits awkwardly beside Haiti's official nationalism.

Diplomatically quarantined for most of the nineteenth century, Haiti nonetheless supplied a large share of the world's coffee and needed manufactured goods it could not produce. Pierre examines how the country's rulers, its propertied classes and the mass of people shut out of the global market met the loosening of trade rules in the postcolonial Americas.

Reading British correspondence and ledgers, the article follows dealings between Christophe and Pétion and merchants and naval officers such as Downie and Robert Sutherland during the Napoleonic wars. British agents described both Haitian leaders as capable and eager for English commerce — assessments at odds with the racial contempt of official language at the time — while using their ties to the navy and government to pull Haitian trade toward London. The absence of any treaty, Pierre argues, is precisely what made lopsided bargains possible, and places Haiti at the front of Atlantic economic liberalism rather than outside it.

Louis works among Haitian migrants in the Bahamas, where Protestant churches have displaced the Catholic parish at the centre of religious life. His hinge is a distinction his interlocutors draw between Pwotestan and Kretyen, the second naming a stricter, baptized, morally serious believer. It lets them criticize their own compatriots while describing the kind of citizen they think Haiti needs.

He sets this beside figures charting Protestant growth from a sliver of Haiti's population in 1930 to roughly a third, with the same movement visible in New York and elsewhere in the diaspora, and against a scholarship still largely occupied with Catholicism and Vodou. For his consultants, being genuinely Christian is the route to personal salvation and to repairing the country. Pat Robertson's claim that the earthquake settled a bargain struck at Bois Caïman did not startle them, because it matched a reading of the Haitian past they already held.

Trouillot's subject is how historical narratives get made, and by whom. They are produced unevenly, by groups and individuals with markedly unequal access to the means of production, and the forces involved — quieter than gunfire or property — are not for that reason weaker. He refuses both the claim that we are captives of the past and the claim that history is simply whatever anyone makes of it.

The opening example is the Alamo. Santa Anna took the mission in March 1836 and lost at San Jacinto six weeks later, where Houston's men shouted its name as they attacked. In doing so they made history twice over: as actors capturing a general, and as narrators who converted a defeat into the trial that made victory inevitable.

That doubleness runs through the book, which works on the ambiguity of the word itself — what happened, and what is said to have happened — and on the silences that separate them.

Haiti's first novel tells the revolution as allegory. Two enslaved half-brothers, Romulus and Remus, one fathered by an African and the other by the Colonist, are driven to revolt by the killing of their mother, Marie the African, an event dated to 1789. Stella is no ordinary character but Liberty in the flesh, the Star of Nations, who with the Spirit of the Nation convinces the brothers they can win only once they stop fighting each other.

Bergeaud wrote from exile, and the editors place him among a generation of Haitian writers who were also politicians and who composed with France watching: the imagery is classical and European, and the few local plants that appear are explained for outsiders.

Their introduction also lays out the history the allegory shadows, from Oge's revolt and the Leclerc expedition to the 1825 indemnity and the long fragmentation under Christophe, Petion and Boyer.

Juste Chanlatte, among the first authors published in independent Haiti, left almost no biographical trace beyond hostile asides in nineteenth-century histories. Bongie sets out to recover him as a central figure in the writing of the years just after 1804, when a French-educated man of colour who had manoeuvred through the revolution turned to composing for the new state.

The essay reads Chanlatte's pamphlets and his Cri de la nature alongside Vastey, tracing a shared vocabulary of veils and unveiling and a counter-history answering European accounts of the colony's destruction. What holds Bongie's attention is how unstable race becomes in these texts, held in becoming rather than fixed.

The second half turns to what happened next. A minor French abolitionist writer reissued Chanlatte's book in Paris under his own framing, unprompted, and Bongie reads the editorial changes, most trivial and one decisive, as an exercise of power that shuts down the questions the Haitian original had opened.

Haiti's roads, on Yarrington's account, were shaped by a quarrel over the meaning of a word. Rival Haitian understandings of liberté, the article contends, organized an ideological contest that governed how the country's transport infrastructure did and did not develop.

The span under examination runs from independence in 1804 to the arrival of the United States Occupation, which lasted from 1915 to 1934. Only the opening of the abstract is available, so the fuller argument about mobility and urbanization is not represented here.

After the earthquake of January 2010, non-governmental organizations arrived in Haiti in extraordinary numbers, bringing with them foreigners who took up every sort of job and project. Photography became one of the sector's working tools, a means for organizations large and small to raise money and draw attention to what they were doing.

Garland examines how that imagery operates. The essay treats the post-earthquake NGO world as a version of a tourism boom, built around the voluntourist who spends a stretch of time in the country, records the stay on a phone or a digital camera, and pushes the results out across social media. Those pictures, together with others made by foreign visitors, are then set against a much older habit of depicting Haiti and the Caribbean, and against the part tourism has played in Haitian history.

Garrigus revives a comparative approach that historians largely abandoned decades ago, once the field settled on economics and demography as the forces shaping the lives of free and enslaved people of African descent more than European religious or legal traditions. That consensus cannot explain why colonies with matching economies and populations produced unlike racial orders.

He asks why Jamaica's racial rules stayed looser than Saint-Domingue's. Wealthy free families of color in Jamaica could obtain privileges setting them above other free people of color; in Saint-Domingue after 1770, law filed even rich freeborn families under the label affranchis, ex-slaves.

Three causes carry the explanation. Quarrels with Versailles over military service and colonial loyalty after 1763 produced a crisis of imperial identity with no Jamaican counterpart; friction among whites ran higher in the French colony; and the two elites worked through different legal institutions, which shaped whether class or racial labeling prevailed in dealings with the richest free colored planters.

In the first half of the nineteenth century most African Americans rejected the American Colonization Society's schemes for settling Black Americans in Africa, and said so loudly. Bourhis-Mariotti attends instead to the minority who broke with that consensus and argued for an emigration of their own choosing, to territories much nearer at hand.

The article follows the genesis and development of what she calls Haitian propaganda: where the campaign came from, how its arguments changed, and how it reached its height in the 1850s.

The campaign produced results on the ground. Between 1859 and 1862 several thousand free and recently emancipated Black Americans left for Haiti, the outcome toward which decades of argument had been building.

Ciccariello-Maher begins with Susan Buck-Morss's influential treatment of Hegel and Haiti, then pushes past it toward larger questions about dialectics and the universal that the Haitian Revolution forces open.

Reading with C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins in hand, he identifies what he calls ironic silences in her argument. Chief among them is the near-absence of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who succeeded Toussaint, and whom Ciccariello-Maher restores to the center of the account. Along with that restoration comes a claim about method: struggles fought in the name of particular identities are not obstacles to the universal but part of how it gets made.

The final move brings in Frantz Fanon, whose rewriting of Hegel's master-slave relation drops out of Buck-Morss's account entirely. Taken up as a corrective, Fanon allows the question of progress toward the universal to be posed again in dialectical terms that have been decolonized.

Soden marks the release of a new handbook, Planning an Open Cities Mapping Project, by turning back to the volunteer work that inspired the team behind it. Writing more than four and a half years after the earthquake of January 12, 2010, he frames the OpenStreetMap response in Haiti as the earlier effort worth revisiting.

The text captured in this record breaks off there, so the specifics of his retrospective cannot be reported from it.

Three historians take up one problem from three vantage points: what happened after slavery ended, for the people freed, for those who had owned them, and for the societies that held both. The premise is that treating emancipation as the tidy close of an evil institution skips the harder part, the questions and struggles that opened once slavery was gone.

Holt works on Jamaica, where the contested meaning of citizenship became the ground on which freedom was defined and defined again. Scott follows southern Louisiana and Cuba, tracing tangled conflicts and the alliances that formed across racial lines. Cooper turns to French West Africa and the point where emancipation met imperial ambition.

A jointly written introduction pulls the cases together around citizenship, labor, and race in the years after emancipation, pointing toward a fuller reckoning with what freedom was taken to mean.

Between 1798 and 1801, in the middle of the Haitian Revolution, John Adams and Toussaint Louverture built a working diplomatic relationship, one that let white Americans back the liberty and self-rule of Saint-Domingue's people of color. The United States sent economic aid along with arms and munitions, and the conflict became the first occasion on which the U.S. Navy fought on behalf of a foreign ally.

Johnson, a historian and former diplomat, gives the alliance its first book-length treatment, setting out what these two revolutionary peoples wanted and how each maneuvered in a hostile Atlantic world. Leaders on both sides managed multiracial dealings in settings organized around slavery and racial hierarchy.

The diplomacy did not end American slavery, but it changed how slavery and race were argued about in the Atlantic world well into the twentieth century. No durable alliance followed, and the two republics went their separate ways.

A collaborative volume that reads the age of revolutions from the Mediterranean outward, tracing how ideas, exiles, capital and images moved between southern Europe and the Americas between the Seven Years' War and the 1860s. Its first section follows a Neapolitan route: Genovesi's imagined travels, the Enlightenment at Naples, Charles III between Spain and the Indies, the expelled Spanish Jesuits, and the long quarrel over the nature of the New World.

Later sections track revolutionary echoes across the ocean, constitutional experiments running from Cadiz to South America and the pull of English constitutional models within the Mediterranean, and finally the making of new nations, with republics and federations, caudillos and temporary dictatorships, Spanish and Italian exiles in London, and the slow passage out of slavery.

Geggus contributes a chapter on Saint-Domingue, whose fifteen-year upheaval he calls the most transformative of the period, and whose exports underwrote French Atlantic prosperity as far as Marseille.

The revolution in Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804 remains the one slave rebellion in which enslaved and formerly enslaved people ended slavery and founded an independent state, which is why Ferrer describes it as possibly modernity's most radical upheaval. Fifty miles away in Spanish Cuba, its effect ran the other way.

Cuban planters and authorities watched the neighboring colony come apart and moved to ensure nothing similar happened to them, reinforcing slavery and colonial rule instead. Slave society in Cuba was thus violently entrenched at exactly the moment when a nearby example of enslaved people destroying slavery was impossible to ignore.

Ferrer's method is to refuse the usual separation between these two histories. Told as one linked sequence rather than two national stories, the Haitian Revolution and the rise of Cuban slave society each cast fresh light on the other, and on Caribbean and Atlantic history in the period.

Fatton's diagnosis is that Haiti has fallen out of the periphery of the world economy into something worse. He calls it the outer periphery: a zone occupied by states under international tutelage, where politics is zero-sum and catastrophe recurrent. Three forces put Haiti there, in his account, namely an externally imposed neoliberal order, a chronic crisis of governability, and the earthquake of January 2010.

Domestic actors are not spared. With production stagnant, closeness to state power becomes the readiest route to wealth for anyone outside the established elite, since the state still issues licences, collects taxes and controls force. The result is patronage, criminal arrangement and networks of banditry linking businessmen, politicians and officers.

Meanwhile aid dependence and the proliferation of NGOs have hollowed the state to the point of virtual trusteeship, leaving a country sustained by remittances and foreign assistance and confined to the cheapest end of global production.

Joseph reads the Haitian Revolution as a religious event as much as a political one, and builds his book around figures whose theology has rarely been treated as theology. He opens with a survey of recent North American scholarship, naming what he calls a Haitian Turn in how the field now handles freedom, modernity and the Enlightenment.

At the centre is a close reading of the prayer attributed to Dutty Boukman at Bois Caïman in August 1791. Placing it beside James Cone's writing on the God of the oppressed, Joseph argues that Boukman articulated a black liberation theology long before the term existed, one that dismantled the master's God and claimed divine vindication for the enslaved. A companion chapter reads François Makandal's campaign of violence through Fanon's account of decolonization and revolutionary humanism.

Two closing chapters follow Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes, who weighed Christianity and Vodou differently but both took the revolution as proof of black self-determination.

Haitian heads of state are remembered, when remembered at all, as a long succession of failures and thieves. Destin finds that improbable across two centuries and more than fifty presidencies, and sets out to name what some of them built.

Seven are examined. Christophe raised the Citadelle Laferriere and Sans-Souci; Boyer joined the northern kingdom to the southern republic; Geffrard secured recognition from Lincoln's Washington and restored relations with Rome; Salomon founded the national bank and the postal service; Hyppolite introduced the telephone and the iron market at Port-au-Prince; Estime opened the civil service to Haitians rising out of the peasantry; Magloire oversaw the Peligre dam and the national stadium.

Each represents, in Destin's argument, a moment when the Haitian state functioned. That these achievements survive as footnotes, or as popular songs and nicknames, is the pattern he wants readers to notice.

Smith writes the entangled histories of the eighteenth century's two richest sugar colonies after bondage ended in each: Haiti independent from 1804, Jamaica emancipated in 1838. This is not comparison in the strict sense. The two are handled separately at points and then sewn back together, on the argument that each remained present in how the other saw the world.

The connection predates 1804, with Saint-Domingue emigres such as the Espeut family arriving in Kingston with the people they held, and it thickened afterwards through refugees, exiles, labourers and others crossing between the islands.

What binds the two is a shared struggle over what freedom would mean once the plantation order broke down. Ruling classes on both sides fought vainly to hold that order together, majorities were shut out of politics, economies failed, fires and earthquakes compounded the strain. The book ends on divergence, with the American occupation of 1915 testing Haitian freedom again.