Vastey published this book in 1814 as chief publicist for Christophe's kingdom. It was the one major work of his that went untranslated in his lifetime, while three others were hurried into English for a media campaign conducted on the regime's behalf in Britain. The edition presents it as the earliest systematic account of colonialism as a system rather than a catalogue of abuses, anticipating by well over a century what Césaire, Sartre and Fanon would argue.

In ninety-seven pages Vastey sets out nearly everything he would later develop: an assertion of African origins for civilisation, close readings of European racial science and colonial law, and an unusual alertness to the way European writing itself governs the colonies. Its most extraordinary passage is an inventory of more than a hundred named former colonists and the crimes they committed against the people they owned, his own white grandfather included.

Saint Domingue's final royal governor went to the guillotine in Paris on 15 April 1793. Blanchelande had been convicted of working against the Revolution: he was said to have denied the colony's white settlers their liberties and to have helped along the slave insurrection that began in 1791. Popkin reconstructs those two years from archives no one had used.

Blanchelande blundered often, and Popkin grants it. Yet the verdict registers more than one man's failures. It marks the collision between what the Revolution professed in its liberal opening years and what governing a slave colony actually required. His orders could not all be obeyed at once: leave the white settlers to govern themselves, make them equal with free people of color, and crush the revolt. One trial witness said the job exceeded any person's powers.

The article sets aside the durable charge of counterrevolutionary motive and reads the episode within a crisis running through every transatlantic empire of the period.

Lundahl's study, first published in 1983, asks why a country as poor as Haiti has an economy that has performed so badly, and answers by setting the question in historical perspective.

Agriculture carries the weight of the analysis. Lundahl examines how farm production is structured, explains why the land yields so little, and shows that farming has failed to provide people with an adequate standard of living. The backwardness of agricultural technology gets its own account.

The political conclusion is blunt: no government since 1820 has taken economic development seriously, because vested interests step in reliably enough to discourage new projects before they get anywhere.

A documentary reader built around primary sources from colonial Saint-Domingue and the revolution that destroyed it. Geggus supplies the editorial introductions and a compact narrative account of the revolt itself, so that the documents arrive with enough context to be read on their own terms.

Much of the material had not appeared in print before. Geggus gathered it from archives on both sides of the Atlantic and translated it for this edition, including sources on the conditions that pushed enslaved people and free people of color toward revolt in 1791.

The volume is pitched at readers meeting the subject for the first time as well as at those already working on it.

Trouillot's first book, Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti (1977), is the least familiar thing he published: written in Haitian Creole, never widely circulated, and long out of print. Past and Hebblethwaite, who are translating it into English for the first time, examine what it set in motion.

The book is a Marxist reading of colonial history through Haiti's own, and it treats the revolution of 1791 to 1803 as the key to interpreting and criticizing Haiti's more recent past. Rather than celebrate revolutionary heroes in the epic manner, Trouillot faults the Haitian generals for governing along European lines and puts the enslaved masses back at the center of events. Drawing on Haitian storytelling, proverbs, and song, he follows the rivalries, killings, and maneuvering that produced the Haitian state and shows how they shaped it afterward.

The essay closes with the translators considering why Trouillot waited so long to permit an English version.

Restavek arrangements place an estimated 300,000 Haitian children in unpaid domestic servitude. Kennedy reports on a pair of connected qualitative studies that drew on children who had left such placements and on the adults now caring for them.

What emerges is a cluster of difficulties and psychological symptoms that surface after a child gets out. Four are treated in depth: symptoms turned inward and outward, exposure to violence, the cold reception many children meet on returning to their families, and the toll taken by the economic circumstances they come back to.

Kennedy closes with proposals for how services and interventions for these children might be designed.

Microfinance arrived with a promise that small loans would lift poor borrowers, especially women, out of poverty. Kleinman argues the industry has quietly changed its object and now answers to investors seeking returns rather than to the social purpose it was founded on, a shift that mounting defaults and predatory lending have made hard to ignore.

His method is discourse analysis rather than economics. Reading the mission statements, reports and press releases of lenders working in Haiti, among them Fonkoze, ACME and Sogesol, alongside the literature of the World Bank and the large philanthropies, he examines how the vocabulary of human and social capital turns borrowers into subjects to be governed, in Foucault's sense, and lets a basic contradiction pass unnoticed.

Where interest rates on these loans have run between thirty and fifty-five percent, the distance between short-term social claims and long-term financial goals is plain enough.

Greer examines what ethnicity does politically among Black Americans, distinguishing recent immigrants from those born in the United States.

The evidence comes from a survey she designed for a labour population in New York City, set alongside several national data sources. Her conclusion is that racial and ethnic identity together shape how different Black ethnic groups understand their prospects for advancement and where they place themselves within the American polity.

This bilingual edition gathers the constitutions that governed Haiti and its colonial predecessor across seventy years, with an editorial introduction explaining where each printed text came from and why one version was preferred to another.

The sequence opens with Louverture's constitution of 1801, which formalised a governing structure already in place and made him the colony's sole legitimate voice to Paris; its promulgation brought the Leclerc expedition, and Louverture's death at the Fort de Joux. After independence, Dessalines's charter of 1805 declared an empire, entrenched the abolition of slavery — a clause repeated down to 1849 — barred white men from owning land, refused to name a dominant religion and permitted divorce.

Later documents swing between republic, empire and monarchy while returning to the same questions of citizenship, foreign landholding and religion. All insist on sovereignty, and all reassure foreign powers that Haiti had no intention of exporting its revolution.

Bellegarde-Smith and Michel set out the metaphysical architecture of Haitian Vodou while refusing the habitual sorting of religions into center and margin. Vodou, in their account, is a religion of the Americas whose metaphysics has grown into something like a national ethos, anchored in past and present time alike.

The serpent pair Danbala and Ayida serves as their organizing figure. Through these lwa the essay traces how the sacred breaks into ordinary life, how devotees negotiate with divine energies, how ritual lineage and family descent intertwine, and how gender is understood in terms too intricate for a simple binary. The same pair opens onto reflection about the natural world.

What emerges from these threads is a cluster of linked ideas: the oneness of being, the pursuit of equilibrium, and konesans, a wisdom that absorbs knowledge into itself — all gathered in the image of the rainbow serpents' cosmic egg.

Walsh reads Toussaint Louverture and Aime Cesaire together, using their writings to ask how each understood and recounted a defining moment in the decolonizing of the French Caribbean. For Louverture that moment is the revolution that freed the colony of Saint-Domingue; for Cesaire it is the 1946 departmentalization that folded Martinique and other colonies into France itself.

Setting the two side by side lets Walsh trace what connects them. Emancipation left distinct legacies in each case, and those legacies were carried forward in narratives of revolution and nationhood that later generations inherited.

By revisiting both figures through the several layers of narrative they left behind, the book arrives at an account of what it has meant, historically and in the present, to be free and French in the Caribbean.

A review essay: Geggus reads four recent studies of revolutionary Haiti together, published between 2006 and 2012.

They are Laurent Dubois's history of the country's long aftermath, John Garrigus's work on colonial Saint-Domingue, race and citizenship, Philippe Girard's account of Toussaint Louverture and the war of independence fought from 1801 to 1804, and Jeremy Popkin's study of the revolution and the ending of slavery.

Haiti occupies a large place in how the western hemisphere is imagined, and the images attached to it pull in opposite directions. Is it a country defined by tyranny, or the site of the only successful slave revolution? Given over to devilish practice, or devoutly religious? Does being the hemisphere's second independent nation give it something to teach about life after colonialism, or is the lesson one of failure?

The essays gathered here come from several disciplines and take up three tasks: assessing Haiti's influence across the hemisphere, placing its successive representations in context, and reading Haitian cultural expression on its own terms.

Getting anywhere, the editors suggest, means first cutting through a thick layer of stereotype: Haiti as the region's low point of poverty, political dysfunction and savagery, and as a dependent unable to govern or provide for itself. The collection aims at accounts adequate to a more complicated history.

Haitian independence reverberated among Africans across the Atlantic world, and Barima traces one channel of that influence: Jamaica in the decades on either side of the revolution.

The starting condition matters to the argument. Maroon polities in Jamaica had signed treaties with the colonial establishment in 1739 and 1740, a serious setback for the fight against slavery there. Events in Haiti revived that fight, Barima contends, feeding marronage, conspiracies, and open revolt through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The study examines how Jamaica's Africans and Afro-Creoles mirrored what was happening in Haiti while carrying forward West and Central African culture and spirituality as part of the campaign for freedom. Revisiting this political and religious terrain, Barima argues, brings into view earlier answers to the same summons the captives had raised.

Two black newspapers in New York City, Freedom's Journal and the Colored American, carried out what Yingling identifies as one of the earliest sustained racial projects in the United States, across the years from 1827 to 1841.

Facing constant slander aimed at black Americans, the editors set about redefining who their readers were within the Black Atlantic, moving away from an idea of a shared African past that was losing its hold. Freedom's Journal put the Haitian Revolution to work as proof of resistance, of the abolitionist case, and of self-rule.

The Colored American, coming later, made different use of the same country. It held up the Republic of Haiti as an example of sound government, prosperity, and refinement, a portrait fitted to that community's own growing claims on citizenship, inclusion, and rights.

Vèvè Clark proposed reading African diasporic literature through marasa consciousness, a theory of textual relationships modeled on the Haitian divine twins. Pressley-Sanon extends the idea in two directions: back toward the concept's African sources, themselves already doubled, and forward into contemporary Haitian fiction.

Her material is three stories from Haiti Noir, the anthology Edwidge Danticat edited in 2011, by Évelyne Trouillot, Katia D. Ulysse and Gary Victor, grouped as a marasa twa of her own devising. Though the narratives sit squarely in the New World, she argues that their African inheritance shapes them, and surfaces plainly in at least one.

What the marasa offers, on her reading, is not a stalled opposition but a third term. The dosu or dosa, the child born after twins, supplies the resolving element that pairings of here and there, us and them, home and abroad otherwise lack, and that diaspora and foreign intervention make pressing.

Sutton and Quinn introduce a volume built around David Nicholls's work, picking out the arguments of his that have drawn the most comment and the most criticism.

The best known concerns colour. Nicholls read much of nineteenth-century Haitian politics as a contest between an urban, commercial, largely mulatto elite and a rural, military, largely black one, and identified the two rival versions of the national past each side used to justify itself. But he insisted that colour was the badge of class rather than its substance, that blacks could hold the mulatto legend and mulattoes the black, that the politique de doublure muddied the picture further, and that colour usually counted only where other divisions reinforced it.

They also take up his refusal to call Duvalierism fascist or totalitarian, treating it instead as a further growth of post-colonial patterns already visible in the previous century, and his insistence that Caribbean politics be read historically and on its own terms.

What language did the leaders of the Haitian Revolution actually speak? Girard tries to answer that for Toussaint Louverture in particular, using accounts left by people who knew him, letters written by other former slaves, and the memoir Louverture composed shortly before he died.

Reading these documents closely as a historian and a linguist, he concludes that Louverture wrote in French almost without exception, reserved Kreyòl for speech, above all when he addressed laborers, and hardly ever fell back on the Ewe-Fon of his Arada forebears.

The memoir also bears on a dispute among linguists. Against those who trace Haitian Kreyòl chiefly to African languages, Girard finds the stronger imprint to be that of older, regional and lower-class forms of French. Louverture's own attachment to French, he adds, supports readings of him as a moderate drawn to metropolitan models.