Girard reads the papers of a single estate, the Bréda plantation at Haut-du-Cap, and finds that flight from it was roughly ten times more common than the runaway notices in the colonial press would indicate.

The gap is widest for collective departures, the temporary walkouts long dismissed as something less than real marronage. These show up neither in the newspapers nor in the plantation's accounting records, yet on this estate they were both the most frequent form of flight and the one most likely to succeed.

If other plantation studies turn up the same pattern, Girard suggests, the long-running Debien-Fouchard argument about the links between marronage and the revolt of 1791 would need rethinking. His proposal is to set aside the division between small and large marronage and look instead at group flight, whose revolutionary potential has been undervalued.

Most of those who made the revolution in Saint-Domingue left no writing of their own, and what survives of them comes from hostile witnesses with reasons to shape the record. Toussaint Louverture is the exception. Dubois works by reading such sources against the grain, and presents the result as provisional, a story that invites retelling rather than closing the question.

He is wary of two habits. One treats the revolution's violence as a puzzle of blame, asking who committed atrocities first instead of setting political violence in the context every revolution provides. The other lets racial labels explain what they only describe: he abandons the term mulatto for gens de couleur, and insists that shifting political projects, not colour or class, account for how people acted.

The consequences were worldwide. A society that granted freedom and citizenship across colour lines helped destroy slavery in the Americas and left later struggles a foundation.

Weaver reconstructs a medical world in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue staffed largely by enslaved practitioners: herbalists, kaperlatas, hospitalières, infirmières, and accoucheuses. Out of Western, African, and Caribbean remedies they assembled a form of medicine particular to the island, and they treated both enslaved patients and the colony's white residents.

Trust ran along predictable lines. Enslaved people preferred the methods of the popular healers, herbalists and kaperlatas above all, whose care felt familiar to them. Poorer whites who could not pay for orthodox medicine, or wanted no part of it, consulted kaperlatas as well.

Others found the arrangement profitable. Plantation managers put the medical labor of enslaved women to work in ways that enriched the planters employing them and enriched the managers themselves. Licensed practitioners, for their part, drew on what enslaved herbalists knew about remedies, and in dealing with enslaved midwives sought to pull them further under the supervision of European medical men.

Blackburn opens by describing the system that was about to come under attack. By 1770 New World slavery was not a leftover from an older order but something new. The sugar estate, with its calibrated labour and mechanical rhythms, half anticipated the factory, and the planter was an entrepreneur who could sit out war or slump on his estate's own subsistence and then expand hard when markets beckoned.

He separates this from the ancillary slavery of the early Spanish empire, where wealth came from conquering and taxing indigenous populations, and ties the newer form's growth to European appetite: sugar, tobacco and cotton were small pleasures that pulled ordinary people into a money economy and paid useful revenue to states.

The arithmetic is stark. Some six million captives landed in the Americas during the eighteenth century against roughly a million Europeans, with mortality so severe that a trade on that scale was needed merely to keep numbers from falling.

The Code Noir of 1685 opened by ordering all Jews out of France's colonies, which makes their presence in Saint-Domingue a puzzle. Loker's answer is that the law went unenforced as often as not, that bribes and loopholes worked, and that many arrivals presented themselves at first as New Christians.

Sifting notarial acts, indemnity registers, parish records and family letters, he maps names across the colony: around Jeremie and the district named for a rabbi called Moron, at Les Cayes, in Leogane and Port-au-Prince, in Jacmel. Most had come from the Sephardic towns of southwestern France or from Curacao and the smaller Antilles.

His answer to his own title is narrow. Only at Cap Francais does the evidence support an organized community, with a prayer leader, a burial ground, and a fundraising letter from Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel addressed to its members. Elsewhere he finds scattered families whose religious life, if any, went unrecorded.

Between the rising of 1791 and Christophe's death in 1820, the richest plantation colony in the Americas became a country of small proprietors. Lacerte treats that as the central economic fact of the period and asks how successive governments, French and Haitian alike, tried and failed to prevent it.

Every regime wanted the estates kept whole and worked. Coercion produced desertion and falling revenue instead, and the southern republic ran deficits from 1808 to 1812. Petion raised the cultivator's share of the crop to a half, alarming an elite whose position rested on the old arrangement, and after dissolving the Senate in 1809 he began handing out land outright, first to veterans according to rank, later more widely, sometimes in place of unpaid salaries.

The figures are poor, one nineteenth-century estimate putting it at seventy-six thousand carreaux among some two thousand recipients, but the result is clear: two decades of quiet, and a subsistence economy leaning on a single export.

When the British leased out the estates of absentee planters in the districts they still held in 1796, they generated something historians of Saint-Domingue rarely have: 197 plantation inventories compiled on a common model within a single six-month window. Geggus uses them to describe a slave society at one moment, across roughly fifteen thousand people.

The tabulations cut in several directions. Ethnic origins varied sharply by region and by crop, which complicates any single estimate of the colony's African composition, and the traces of contraband imports suggest that common figures for illicit slave trading are too high. Sugar and coffee estates differed in structure, and the population looks more creolized and more evenly balanced by sex than had been supposed. What the columns show most starkly is physical ruin: nearly two-fifths under sixteen or over sixty, a tenth recorded as of no value, one adult man in six sick, disabled or dying.

A collection on the people who left Saint-Domingue during its revolution and washed up, by way of Cuba and elsewhere, in Louisiana.

The opening essay makes the largest claim. Louisiana and Saint-Domingue were one colonial world, tied by trade, shipping, kinship and a shared Creole language, and the older colony effectively made the younger one. The refugee waves of the early nineteenth century were therefore not an arrival of strangers but a return within the family — a transfusion that prolonged the life of French Creole Louisiana and left the region opaque to the rest of the country.

An editorial introduction tests this against the 1850 census and church records. The refugees who went to the countryside stayed few, mostly white and poor, farming or working trades, with the great majority holding under five hundred dollars in property. Those who stayed in New Orleans held their identity far longer, sustained by intermarriage and repeated failed attempts to reclaim island estates.