Haiti buys roughly four-fifths of the rice it consumes from abroad and pays a premium for it. Import rules cap broken kernels at four percent, which pushes the country toward some of the costliest non-fragrant long grain rice anywhere — a strange position for a poor nation that depends on rice as a staple.

Richardson and colleagues test whether that standard matches what buyers actually want. A non-hypothetical field experiment in open-air markets, with three hundred observations, measured how shoppers priced rice containing more broken grains. Across locations and income groups, only the highest earners paid extra for a cleaner sample.

The authors read this as a signal to policymakers that consumers will accept rice above the four percent threshold. Since broken rice carries the same nutritional value and can be sourced more cheaply on world markets, they argue that relaxing the rule could ease food insecurity by offering an alternative to expensive domestic and imported grain.

Niño and González use process tracing to ask what motivated the hiring of mercenaries to remove Haiti's increasingly authoritarian president. Tracing that question back through the country's history, they map the points at which crime and political institutions grew into one another.

What they describe is a phantom state: a political structure that exists in name but has been supplanted in practice, its authority contested by rival groups until state presence became limited, fragmented, delegated, and authoritarian. Force is no longer the state's alone; it is parceled out among competing oligopolies of violence, with state institutions serving as machinery for criminal organizations to hold territory and take profit.

On this account Jovenel Moïse had allied his government with the strongest gangs while weakening political groups and criminal rivals, and the mercenaries became the instrument for breaking that grip. The killing, the authors conclude, followed a plan by political leaders acting with judicial complicity to check the concentration of executive power.

Rich and Jean-Charles survey mental health and the psychological professions in Haiti, opening with a compact portrait of the country: its racial and ethnic groups, its population and cities, and a history carrying both proud heritage and present standing as the hemisphere's poorest nation. Religion gets its own treatment — Catholic and Protestant Christianity alongside Vodou — as do crime, poverty, joblessness, substance misuse, and the weight of the 2010 earthquake and other disasters.

The chapter then follows behavioral health services from their origins to the current state of mental hospitals and psychiatric units, dwelling on how few psychiatrists, doctoral psychologists, and master's-level social workers there are, while noting growth in formal training programs and the stigma that still attaches to seeking care.

Considerable space goes to traditional healing, which matters most in rural areas where clinicians are hard to reach: the varieties of healer, and conditions bound to or shaped by culture. A closing section weighs challenges against opportunities.

Maginn follows the Toussaint, Christophe, and Louverture families across the nineteenth-century Atlantic, tracing how relatives and associates in the United States, Great Britain, and France built what amounted to satellite Haitian communities between 1791 and 1880. Shared language, faith, culture, and political principle held these circles together, and they helped members survive, settle, and at times move up.

The dissertation's most original contribution concerns the networks themselves, which Maginn argues scholars of the Francophone Black Atlantic have left unexplored: they gave these families leverage in local, national, and international affairs.

A further aim is to unsettle standing paradigms of race. The families met racial inequality directly, including through contact with Atlantic slavery, yet their name and property afforded a mobility and independence that other people of color in the same three countries did not have.

Fox studies a mid-twentieth-century turn among Caribbean writers toward Tragedy as a way of thinking about revolution and independence, following Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier and Aimé Césaire as they enlist Henry Christophe (1767-1820) into a usable past. Where the inherited habit was to narrate the Haitian Revolution as Romance, these writers experimented with tragic form to imagine new philosophies of resistance.

The argument extends David Scott's reading of C.L.R. James's 1963 revision of The Black Jacobins, where James trades his epic register for meditation on Tragedy. Fox holds that the revolution's emplotment is tragic regardless, but that Tragedy works as analysis rather than surrender: it can lay bare the colonial subject's dilemma and prompt theories of radical action.

Archival work unsettles the received Christophe, whose reputation as a black tyrant became a racialist palimpsest serving neocolonial ends, though a tragic version surfaces as early as 1823. Walcott and Césaire, Fox argues, saw in him a visionary asserting black humanity.

Ulrickson examines how religion was actually practiced in Haiti during the presidency of Jean-Pierre Boyer, which ran from 1818 to 1843, and asks how citizens pictured their own relationship to God at a moment when the state wanted a national Haitian Catholic church.

The entry point is a lay confraternity in Cap-Haïtien devoted to the Sacred Heart. From it Ulrickson argues that Catholic institutions in the early independence years were built by ordinary believers as much as by officials, and that much of this construction was under way before the government had regularized its standing with the Holy See.

The devotions themselves came from many directions across the Atlantic world. That variety, on this account, fed back into the making of the nation, and particularly into the presidency's ambition for a Catholicism that was nationalized and distinctly Haitian.

Decentralization has circulated in Haitian political talk as a development tool for more than thirty years, since the twenty-nine-year Duvalier dictatorship ended in 1986. Recent fiscal gains have been credited largely to a USAID program, LOKAL+, but whether the extra local revenue actually changed what municipalities spent was never clear.

Léon tests this with a mixed-methods case study of two of the program's nine target communes, supported by descriptive statistics for all nine and a dataset of annual budgets covering each of Haiti's 140 communes from 2012 to 2015. Saint Marc, where the intervention began, and Delmas, reckoned the country's most successful local government, both show modest improvement in public service delivery.

Two cautions follow. Without parallel accountability measures such as citizen engagement, local capture and personalism can distort who gets served. And Haiti's authoritarian legacy, showing up as an absence of political will among central government actors, keeps limiting what decentralization can accomplish.

Reviewing three recent works on Haiti and the early United States — Dun's Dangerous Neighbors, Dillon and Drexler's essay collection, and Daut's Tropics of Haiti — Stieber notes that all three answer Trouillot's call to unsilence Saint-Domingue, and all three complicate it. Far from unthinkable, the revolution was narrated constantly, and in racialized terms, in Philadelphia newspapers and across the Atlantic print world.

Her sharper point concerns method. Silencing the Past deserves reading whole, she argues, rather than being mined for its chapter on Atlantic silences: the book widens outward from disputes internal to Haitian historiography to the framing of Columbus's landfall. The trouble is that the Haitian detail becomes imperceptible as the frame widens, and comparative scholarship risks reproducing that flattening. Her proposed remedy is to bring the work done in Haiti — journals, monographs, the Haitian press — properly into view.

Sweet's research note opens not with Kongo but with a French colonist. Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozières landed at Norfolk, Virginia, on February 26, 1794, after a four-month crossing from Le Havre that began in a storm and never improved.

Worse had come earlier. Two years before, with the revolution just under way, Baudry found his wife and daughter wandering in the woods of Saint-Domingue, driven from their home by rebels. He was an officer, wounded near Léogane, and most of the men under his command were killed. He fled the colony in March 1792, met briefly in Paris with his brother-in-law, the writer Moreau de Saint-Méry, and was soon exiled again, settling in Philadelphia.

There he worked as clerk, bookseller, and editor. He traveled North America, spent time with relatives in New Orleans, and recast himself as an authority on the natural history of the French colonies, lecturing to the American Philosophical Society and publishing on scientific subjects.

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.

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.

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.

Salt examines how American politicians and diplomats late in the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass among them, worked to talk Haiti into the Atlantic world as a full member. A country the century had opened by disavowing, fearing and refusing to recognize was, in the form of its pavilion at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, to be presented as an example of political, social and economic advancement — modern rather than a problem for modernity.

What Salt calls the Haitian Question is not a single query but a cluster of suppositions about the country, only some of which imply deficiency. Colin Dayan's account of Haiti's stigmatization holds, Salt argues, but does not cover the whole.

Rhetorics of trade reciprocity, political equality and racial inclusion share space with the stories of degeneracy. Geography underlies them: Haiti sits between the Windward and Mona Passages, and American designs on those lanes produced conflicting impulses to denounce, isolate, protect, possess and control it.

Niles writes as a traveller, not a historian. The book opens in a New York elevator run by a sea captain temporarily without a ship, whose talk of small ports sends the author south, and then proceeds as a sequence of sketches: a Sunday cockfight where the birds arrive cradled against their owners' chests, market women selling tobacco, rum and plantains under the trees, a drunk gendarme reading a Dumas novel, a prisoner made to drum, a ruined palace and the great walls of the Citadel.

Colour is never far from the surface. Niles dwells on the Dumas ancestry and on the many children of French fathers and African mothers, and lets a guide explain how a lost election once sent him into the hills until the new president forgot who had opposed him.

Published during the American occupation and illustrated with photographs, the book is after atmosphere: light, noise, fear, laughter.