Geggus assesses Blackburn's synthesis of his own two earlier volumes on the rise and fall of American slavery, now carried past 1850 to take in Cuban, Brazilian and North American emancipation, and linked in an epilogue to the emergence of human rights. Blackburn divides New World slavery into three eras, argues that it both fed on and fueled European industrial growth, and credits abolition chiefly to political crisis, slave resistance and class conflict rather than to Protestantism, patriotism or capitalism.

The review admires the scope and doubts the Haitian material. Geggus lists a run of factual errors across the hundred pages on the revolution, thinks the outbreak of war in 1793 and the role of Sonthonax undervalued beside Toussaint Louverture, and notes that regimes resting on forced labor, dictatorship and the banning of Vodou make a poor case for radicalized rights. On Haiti, he judges, the book tilts toward celebration.

Recent work on the Age of Revolutions has taken African actors seriously; indigenous ones, Kim argues, are still missing from it. Her case is St. Vincent, where the Caribs fought Britain in the Second Carib War of 1795-96 and came close to breaking its hold on the island.

British chroniclers called them Black Caribs, a label meant to present them as African newcomers with no aboriginal claim. Kim shows that Amerindians had lived on St. Vincent long before Britain claimed it in 1763, and that they had turned the island into a refuge, absorbing Africans who fled nearby colonies and dealing with French administrators who supplied them once war began.

The defeat was total: starvation, surrender, deportation to Balliceaux where roughly half died, then removal to Roatan. Kim reads the war not as futile resistance but as a rare attempt by a mixed force under Amerindian leadership to exploit imperial crisis and hold its own territory.

Scott's conversation with Orlando Patterson follows his formation from rural Jamaica to the writing of his first novel. Patterson recalls a childhood in Vere and May Pen, boarding with a foreman's family beside the canefields, walking down the path to an Indian settlement, and the day a one-room lending library arrived under a cricket pavilion, which he treats as the decisive event of his early education.

Kingston College under Bishop Percival Gibson, the years of decolonization and the rise of the People's National Party, and the poorer districts of west Kingston all enter the account, as does his refusal on principle to compete for a Rhodes scholarship and his choice of the London School of Economics.

The later stretch turns to writing: the struggling women of his early stories and of a lost teenage novel, his reading of Camus, and the Rastafari of The Children of Sisyphus, who he says lived the problem of meaninglessness rather than philosophizing about it.

Toussaint Louverture wrote his constitution in 1801 as governor-general of Saint-Domingue, years before Haiti existed. Its third article declared that everyone there is born, lives, and dies free and French, a statement of loyalty to the French Republic that simultaneously advertised his own independent authority.

Semley examines the difficult kind of black citizenship the document tried to build, resting at once on the end of slavery and on continued membership in an empire. The constitution is read next to French constitutions of the 1790s and to Haiti's own early constitutions, with attention to how each speaks about marriage and family in gendered terms.

Louverture sought to convert racial slavery into black citizenship by enforcing standards of order, purity, and family life, and in doing so, Semley argues, arrived at troubling new accounts of blackness and Frenchness, and of a gendered self, that bear on present-day debates over human rights.

Toussaint Louverture's years before the revolution were long clouded by legend, in part because Toussaint described his youth in terms that served his politics better than the record. Girard and Donnadieu work from French plantation and notarial documents not previously mined, and a more detailed, more complicated portrait emerges.

They map his kinship network: African-born parents, surrogate parents, his first wife Cécile, his second wife Suzanne, and a wide circle of prominent free black families. One finding is that Jean-Jacques Dessalines had once been enslaved by Toussaint's son-in-law. The circumstances of Toussaint's own enslavement, the family that owned him, and his manumission together suggest a comparatively mild experience of bondage, and the land he accumulated during his rise proves to have been extensive but not dependably profitable.

The wider payoff concerns plantation life, the free population of color in Saint Domingue, and the character of the revolution, and it clarifies the choices Toussaint later made as governor for life.

Payton treats the January 2010 earthquake as a spiritual event as much as a physical one, arguing that some of its deepest effects registered in how survivors understood their world. The evidence comes from recorded life histories gathered after the disaster.

Those testimonies complicate a familiar opposition. Protestantism on one side, Catholicism and Vodou on the other, are usually cast as irreconcilable; what survivors say suggests instead that the traditions borrow from and shape one another.

The article doubles as an account of the Haiti Memory Project, an oral history effort documenting what the quake meant for Haiti's poor majority. Interviews were conducted in Haitian Kreyol, French and English, and the piece preserves that multilingualism: two audio excerpts sit inside the text, with links to further clips and to three complete interviews from the collection.

Forsdick tracks the place of Haiti in Edouard Glissant's writing, from the early poem sequence Les Indes through the prison drama Monsieur Toussaint to the essays gathered in Le Discours antillais. Haiti is Martinique's counter-example: two islands reached by Europeans within a decade of each other and worked by the same plantation system, whose paths diverged irrevocably in the age of revolutions.

Glissant came to the country through Cesaire's example and through his 1946 meeting with the exiled photographer Gerald Bloncourt. What he took from it was less a subject than a method. Toussaint, rewritten across several versions of the play, is kept unfinished and opaque rather than turned into a martyr, and the solidarity he gestures toward across the region anticipates the Antillanite Glissant developed after returning home in 1965.

Haiti works, in the end, as a detour: a history thick enough to make alternative Martinican futures thinkable, and to supply the journal Acoma with its bearings.

Opening a forum of three essays, Dubois takes a line from Cesaire wondering whether anyone can reconstruct what Dessalines actually did at Vertieres, and uses it to frame the difficulty of writing about Haiti's founder at all.

The figure he sketches is deliberately double. Dessalines rose from nothing to command and then to nationhood; he also built an authoritarian regime on the claim that he alone embodied the people and alone could prevent their re-enslavement, kept and accumulated plantations, and left behind a durable tradition of militarism. These contradictions, Dubois insists, belong to the ordinary history of power rather than to a story of Haitian exceptionalism.

He closes on memory. Killed in 1806 and gathered up for burial by a woman named Defilee, Dessalines survives most vividly in Vodou, where he joins the Ogou family of warrior spirits and where one song hails him as liberator while another accuses him of destroying the Ibo nation.

Casimir describes the Haitian Revolution and independence as two things at once: a secessionist war against the colonial metropole, and a deep civil fracture. The revolution figures here as an accident within the modern West's sphere of influence, one whose structures are still working themselves out inside and outside the country.

Read over the long term, Haiti's history appears as a failed attempt to reach a compromise after that unexpected split. The argument is that Haiti is now undergoing a forced return to assimilation on terms set by wealthy countries, under a new metropole, the United States.

The oligarchy of Haiti's French citizens fares badly too: its position is precarious, and it loses as the state and the nation decline more rapidly. Facing these fractures squarely, the article proposes, would let Haiti pursue its freedom from a shared internal starting point.

In June 1803 Dessalines wrote to the lieutenant governor of Jamaica offering open ports to British merchants in exchange for arms and manufactures. Gaffield reconstructs what followed, from Jamaican and British archives, to explain why no trade agreement was ever reached.

The obstacle was not simple revulsion at a state governed by former slaves. Officials in Kingston and London were more pragmatic than the literature assumes, floating treaties and weighing commercial gain against the danger to colonial slavery elsewhere; theirs was a calculated mix of isolation, containment and selective engagement. Reports of the massacres of French residents in early 1804 made open dealings awkward, and Nugent came to think a treaty might obstruct imperial aims outright. Meanwhile Curaçao, Saint Thomas and finally Jefferson's United States closed their own trade. The episode, Gaffield argues, is where Haiti entered the international system and was denied a place in it.

In January 1817 seven enslaved men from Jamaica seized the vessel they were working and sailed it to Haiti. Petion refused to give them up, resting his refusal on the article of the 1816 constitution that made anyone of African descent who reached Haitian ground free. Ferrer builds her argument out of the international dispute that followed.

Most scholarship has asked whether Haiti's example inspired abolitionists or rebels elsewhere. Ferrer redirects the question toward the Haitian state, which promised after independence not to interfere with its neighbours and yet legislated an antislavery of its own, addressing itself deliberately to black people across the hemisphere and making its territory a place slavery could not follow.

She refuses a triumphal ending. Legal freedom in Haiti often meant compulsory labour or naval service, and one of the sailors chose slavery under a British master instead. The liberty Haiti's rulers had in mind was not always the liberty their own people wanted.

Historians have settled Dessalines as a man born in the colony who performed Africanness when it served him. Jenson asks why that account needs so much explaining, and returns to what was said while he lived.

The few contemporaries who mentioned his origins at all called him African-born, and that stayed the standard view for another forty years once he was dead. The story of a birth on a named plantation to local parents appears only in the mid-nineteenth century, piecemeal, resting on no baptismal record, no estate register, no testimony from anyone who knew him. People connected to the families named in that story wrote about the revolution without ever claiming a tie to him.

Rather than settle the biography, Jenson uses the gap to question the categories themselves. As with the disputed origins of Olaudah Equiano, African and Creole look less like facts of birth than positions a person grew into.

Haitians honour Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a founder devoted to his countrymen's freedom; white contemporaries called him a butcher. Girard sets both aside for a ruler who took much of his outlook and policy from the Atlantic plantation system he grew up inside.

Archival work in France, Britain and the United States yields an uncomfortable record. Dessalines urged France to arrest fellow black revolutionaries, hesitated for years over breaking with France, and kept close relations with some white Frenchmen even after the massacres of 1804. He negotiated widely with neighbouring states to hold on to colonial trade links, worked to keep the sugar plantations whole though he had himself been enslaved — probably by Toussaint Louverture's son-in-law — imposed a strict feudal order on former slaves, tried to import African labourers, and drew on American and European as well as African sources.

Interest, in Girard's reading, drove Dessalines as much as the race and ideology that dominate the historiography.

Beasley follows four women who sell street food in Jacmel, Haiti, and asks what happens when work that is officially off the books becomes the way a family eats.

The setting is a shadow economy, not criminal enterprise but ordinary law-abiding people earning outside formal channels, in a world where people and money keep moving across borders. Food is where a great deal of women's economic activity happens, which makes it worth examining on its own terms.

One reading of such informal work is that it merely restages a familiar patriarchy. The vendors in this ethnography suggest otherwise. Their arrangements feed large numbers of people more efficiently than government programmes manage, hold a community together, and give the women themselves a sense of agency, mutual support, and a dense network of contacts.

Bellegarde-Smith approaches the January 2010 earthquake as one entry in a long series rather than an isolated catastrophe. Haiti sits on unstable ground and has absorbed shocks of both natural and human making since its colonial beginnings and through its life as a sovereign state.

The country, he notes, was already engaged in remaking itself politically, socially, and culturally in the years after the Duvalier dictatorship ended in 1986, following three decades of family rule begun in 1957. The quake added physical reconstruction to that unfinished work, and prompts him to ask whether the endurance Haitians are so often praised for has a limit.

Writing from a Haitian vantage point, Bellegarde-Smith examines what followed the event Haitians named Goudougoudou, setting it beside the other trials that have tested the country across two centuries.

Padgett and Warnecke take up a problem the 2010 earthquake made visible but did not create: Haiti's development had been faltering for decades before the ground shook. Their diagnosis centers on the unequal position of women, and they propose human development theory as the framework most likely to produce change.

The article sets out recent decades of Haitian economic history alongside the state of women's rights there and the divergent social and economic outcomes men and women experience. From that base it examines how leaving gender equity out of policy has fed the country's record of development failure.

The closing section turns comparative, drawing on developing countries that have built attention to gender equity into their development strategies, including after disasters and during financial crises. The aim is a body of practice, grounded in institutionalist economics, that connects gender inequality to economic development.