Campbell builds an essay around one odd episode — crabs swarming ashore — in Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo of 1808. The reading follows the crustacean backward into eighteenth-century natural history, where writers on the natural world had already loaded the animal with meaning about slavery, and specifically about the threat that enslaved people were thought to pose to European colonization.

Taken as an emblem rather than a stray detail, the swarm lets Sansay do two things at once: register American alarm at the Haitian Revolution and take the edge off that alarm by rendering it in the cool, classifying idiom of science.

Campbell treats the episode as evidence for a wider claim about the period's fiction — that political commentary often sits inside borrowed scientific description, and that early American literary study has something to gain from reading natural history alongside the novels.

Isaac Sasportas was born in French Saint-Domingue around 1779, into the Sephardic Diaspora. Girard follows him to Charleston, where between 1793 and 1795 he lived with his uncle Abraham, a man caught up both in the American Revolution and in the political battles of the French one.

The nephew adopted the uncle's radicalism and carried it home. Back in Saint-Domingue he became a leading planner of an invasion of Jamaica, then British, meant to free the enslaved Africans there. Toussaint Louverture disclosed the plan, and Sasportas was executed in Jamaica in December 1799.

Hall describes an exchange of knowledge in colonial Louisiana. Africans showed Native people how to fight against Spanish and French methods of warfare; Native people in turn guided Africans into the forests and swamps, where communities of the escaped took hold.

That mixing left descendants. White families with long roots in Louisiana frequently have African and Native American ancestors, though after a few generations the connection was seldom acknowledged, least of all on the African side.

On the question of Haitian influence Hall is careful. Enslaved people in Louisiana who organized against slavery during the Age of Revolutions drew some inspiration from Haiti's success and from the instability of the period, but no evidence ties Haitians directly to any Louisiana conspiracy or revolt. What Haiti did send was people: refugees whose arrival doubled the free population of color in New Orleans.

Three books on Haiti come under review together here: David P. Geggus's Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Elizabeth McAlister's Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora, and Herbert Gold's Haiti: Best Nightmare on Earth.

The record for this piece names the works Prou takes up but not the judgments he reaches about them, so no account of his assessments is given here.

Domar revives an argument he found in Kliuchevsky's account of Muscovy and gives it a spare economic form. Where land is plentiful and labour scarce, land yields no rent: a hired man can walk off and farm for himself, so competition among employers pushes wages up to the value of what he produces and leaves the owner nothing.

A state that wants a class of landowners who do not work, as Russia wanted servitors able to equip themselves for war, cannot get one from market forces. Granting them exclusive title to land is not enough while peasants may still move. Only fixing labour in place ends the competition and lets the owner take everything above subsistence.

The hypothesis is stated as an incompatibility among three things, no two of which can coexist with the third. Domar concedes that government action is doing the decisive work, which leaves abundant land neither necessary nor sufficient for bondage.