In January 1822 the Haitian president replied to four Greek expatriates in Paris who had written to him seeking support for the rising against Ottoman rule. Sideris and Konsta present that letter in English translation, with a short account of its recipients and of how it survived.

Boyer declines to send money, explaining that the treasury is exhausted and that absorbing the eastern part of the island has proved ruinously expensive. What he offers instead is recognition: a people who broke their own chains cannot be indifferent to others fighting the same fight, and he closes by invoking Leonidas, Miltiades, Marathon and Salamis.

The editors note that the text comes down through a Greek translation preserved in a revolutionary secretary's papers, and read the classical allusions as a deliberate pairing of the citizen-soldier of antiquity with the volunteers of Haiti and of the Greek revolt.

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.

Toussaint Louverture's constitution of 1801 usually appears as a footnote, overshadowed by his arrest, his deportation and the rise of Dessalines. Drexler and White make a larger claim for it. Once American newspapers circulated the text in the autumn of 1801, no text by a Black author was more widely read in the United States, they contend, and probably none was until Douglass published his Narrative in 1845.

They meet the objections head-on. The document was not written in the United States, not published there first, not about the country, and not authored by Toussaint in any conventional sense, having been drafted by a committee made up largely of white planters.

Their reply is that early African American writing is full of texts with tangled origins, Wheatley's London-printed poems among them, and that reading the constitution as literature shifts where the tradition can be said to begin.

Joseph Bunel served Toussaint Louverture and then Dessalines as a diplomatic and commercial envoy; Marie Bunel, born Fanchette Estève, spent her adult life trading in Cap Français and later Philadelphia. Girard reconstructs both careers from French, British and American archives.

He was a white Frenchman, she a free black Creole, but the argument is that ambition and money shaped their paths more than race did. After years there as a merchant and plantation manager, Joseph took an administrative role under Louverture from 1798, negotiating terms of trade and non-aggression with Britain and the Americans while the Quasi-War ran, before serving as paymaster. That proximity to the regime got him deported when the Leclerc expedition arrived.

Marie, already prosperous before 1791, kept trading straight through the revolution; closeness to Louverture and Henri Christophe never became political engagement. Persecuted with her husband, she rebuilt her business in Philadelphia and returned to Haiti only in 1810, after which the record thins out.

Toussaint Louverture governed Saint-Domingue as a virtually independent ruler from late 1798 until early 1802, yet his record as a statesman has drawn far less attention than the slave revolt that raised him. Girard works through British, French, Spanish, Cuban and American archives to argue that a literature built on United States policy papers has left Louverture receiving other people's decisions rather than pursuing designs of his own.

Those designs were neither the export of revolt nor a straight march to independence. He declined to attack the slave colonies around him, courted London and Washington for trade and for the arms he needed against Rigaud in the south, and stopped short of severing the tie to France. A planter and slave owner himself before 1791, he bound the survival of emancipation to his own survival in office.

The four-way manoeuvring that resulted, among Britain, France, the United States and Saint-Domingue, held for years before collapsing in 1802.

Girard centers his account on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's political career, the calculations he made, the concessions he accepted, and the long negotiation he conducted with the Clinton administration. Rather than place one leader in the right, Girard weighs what each man needed and the moral claims each pressed against the other.

The method gives both sides substance. Aristide and Clinton appear with their constituencies behind them, and the bargaining between them reads as consequential rather than procedural. At the book's core sit the confrontation itself and the foreign-policy machinery running between Haiti and the United States.

Around that core Girard also sketches Haiti as it stood at the time of writing, setting out with unusual clarity the tensions that built toward the violence of recent years and Aristide's removal from office.

MacLeod sets out to unsettle the received portrait of Faustin Soulouque as a dull-witted tyrant whose twelve years in power were an embarrassing interruption in Haitian life. That portrait comes largely from French and American writers, and it leaves obvious puzzles unanswered: how a supposed nonentity outmanoeuvred the senators who elected him in 1847 expecting a figurehead, and why he lasted so long when abler presidents fell within months.

Reading consular dispatches, the government press and nineteenth-century Haitian historians, MacLeod finds a shrewd politician rather than a caricature. Soulouque struck at black extremists as readily as at the Port-au-Prince elite, promoted mulatto talent, and treated his imperial nobility as a cheap way of binding generals, merchants, piquet chiefs and Vodoun leaders to the regime. His campaigns against the Dominican Republic followed convictions his predecessors had shared.

The essay is offered as a prompt to rethink Haiti's recurring strongmen, not as a settled account of them.

By 1928 American rule in Haiti amounted, in Cooper's reckoning, to a joint dictatorship weighted heavily toward Washington. High Commissioner John H. Russell held effective power, President Louis Borno legislated with his consent through a hand-picked Council of State, and the legislature closed by the Marines in 1918 had not met since. Educated Haitians shut out of office attacked it in the press, their only remaining outlet.

The unravelling began with a student strike at the Damien agricultural school in late 1929, which spread into wider protest and ended in bloodshed at Les Cayes. Hoover sent the Forbes Commission, negotiations followed, Stenio Vincent took the presidency, and the last Marines sailed in 1934.

Cooper canvasses the reasons for leaving: defence needs that no longer required the island, finances judged repaired, deeper change conceded unattainable, isolationist opinion at home, and Haitian insistence. His own judgment is that the occupation left little behind and cost the United States standing across Latin America.

Bellegarde sets out to raise the profile of a figure he considers overshadowed by Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines and Christophe. He traces Petion from an unrecognized childhood in Port-au-Prince and a silversmith's apprenticeship through the militia, the war between Rigaud and Toussaint, service in Leclerc's expeditionary force, and his October 1802 decision to turn his division against the French, a defection that drew mulatto officers and maroon bands behind Dessalines.

Three measures define the presidency. He broke up confiscated colonial estates and handed the parcels to soldiers of the independence army, creating a landowning peasantry; he founded a lycee and a girls' school, following Condorcet in making schooling the base of any democratic programme; and he supplied Bolivar with arms, ships and a printing press on the single condition that slavery end wherever the Liberator's forces prevailed.

Bellegarde closes on Petion's mildness, his popular nickname, and his death in 1818 at forty-eight.

Faustin Soulouque had been enslaved until 1793, could write little beyond his name, and commanded the presidential guard when deadlocked ministers settled on him as a compromise in March 1847. They expected a figurehead. Brandon's sketch follows what they got instead.

The country he inherited was unrecognized abroad, pressed for payment of foreign claims, divided north from south and black from mulatto, and had run through three presidents in three years. Soulouque outlasted his ministers, put down the killings of April 1848, and turned to bringing the eastern part of the island back under Haitian authority, winning at Azua before his troops were routed at Ocoa. To dispel the gloom after that defeat he was proclaimed emperor in 1849 and crowned in 1852 with regalia bought abroad.

The invasions failed, and in January 1859, his soldiers deserting to Geffrard, he sailed into exile.

Faustin Soulouque was an undistinguished career soldier when the Haitian Senate made him president in 1847, apparently expecting a man they could manage; he crowned himself emperor and held power for a dozen years. Baur's portrait, published in 1949, treats the reign as a mixture of farce and slaughter and is unsparing about its subject's illiteracy, superstition and fear.

The judgments extend well beyond the man. Baur reads Boyer's fall in 1843 as the removal of a capable mulatto elite and the start of a racial conflict he considers unresolved, and he ranks the imperial years as the turning point after which Haitian politics settled into despotism and corruption. He allows Soulouque two achievements: territory in the interior retained after the failed invasions of the Dominican Republic, and the preservation of Haitian sovereignty through a diplomatic crisis in which foreign powers pressed hard.

Baur's Boyer is a calculator rather than a hero, and the comparison with Machiavelli is meant as praise for a ruler who kept a hated and encircled republic alive.

The country he took over in 1818 had been ruined by invasion, civil war and the long fight against France, was shunned by the powers that mattered, and was split into rival states. Baur credits him with ending that division, extending his authority across the whole island, and purchasing France's acknowledgment in 1825 at a figure that mortgaged Haitian revenues for generations. The cost at home was compulsory cultivation and a long autocracy, and Baur is candid about both, as he is about the rising of 1843 and the Dominican secession that followed.

The essay closes on Boyer living out his exile in Paris and dying there in 1850, marked by a single line in the Times. Written in 1947, it carries that period's racial vocabulary throughout.

Hallward begins from a discrepancy. The 1991 coup against Aristide drew international condemnation and a campaign for his restoration; the coup that removed him again in February 2004 met resignation, indifference, or approval. In the interval a president twice elected by landslide had been rewritten in mainstream commentary as corrupt, aloof and hostile to rights, so that his removal could be presented as a service to Haitian democracy.

The book reconstructs how that was accomplished: sustained misrepresentation in the press, foreign-funded democracy promotion aimed at manufacturing an opposition, and finally armed intervention with American and French backing. Hallward rates it the most effective piece of neo-imperial subversion since the defeat of the Sandinistas, and the more so for scarcely registering as a coup at all.

He also weighs what Lavalas managed and where it failed, setting the movement's emergence in the 1980s against the Duvaliers, the Macoutes, and an elite structurally insulated from the poor majority.

Nicholls builds the book on a single distinction: race has held Haitians together, color has driven them apart. An awareness of shared racial identity, present from the earliest years, gave successive generations a stubborn commitment to national independence; color worked the other way, as rival factions repeatedly preferred foreign intervention to letting their opponents govern, and effective independence was worn away in the process.

He is careful about what the thesis does not claim. Race and color are not offered as the only forces at work, nor as reducible to economics; the chapters that follow tie them instead to class, to international relations, to religious and cultural movements, and to regional and personal loyalty, while granting that their prominence at any given moment tracks the economic conditions of that moment.

The preface carries the account past Jean-Claude Duvalier's flight, through the junta, the handling of former macoutes and Colonel Regala's ascendancy, to conclude that Duvalierism outlived the Duvaliers.

Payton began with a narrow question, why Port-au-Prince's buildings failed so completely in 2010, and ended with a history of how the city was made. Taking the capital's explosive growth after 1950 as her point of departure, she reads its geographic and material forms as expressions of the same processes that underpinned the Duvalier regime between 1957 and 1986.

Some of the evidence is explicit, such as the politics behind the airport's construction and the ideological meaning invested in it. Some is oblique: elite neighborhoods raised over fragile aquifers in the 1970s reveal a deliberate environmental neglect that kept powerful interests satisfied.

Working from historical maps, archival and printed sources, oral histories collected from earthquake survivors and her own years living in the city, she treats slum clearance, transport infrastructure and the politics of cement as ways into the dictatorship's logic and its international setting, and into what she calls its infrastructures of corruption.