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.

People past a hundred have gone largely unstudied, especially in poorer countries where even basic statistics are missing. Dasilma works to close that gap for Haiti, drawing on archival transcripts to give centenarians and supercentenarians on the island a hearing.

Three findings organize the account: these very old people have outlived family, friends and loved ones; their bodies have changed markedly with age; and all mention memory loss, though they speak lucidly about their youth, older customs and what a century has taught them. Six themes emerge from the analysis — loss of financial independence, mixed feelings about living so long, longevity understood as God's will and the fruit of a good heart, criticism of the young, resilience, and wisdom passed on. Faith and prayer sustain them against scarcity, loneliness and neglect.

Dasilma argues the material has uses beyond the academy, for physicians weighing prevention over after-the-fact care and for teachers, students and leaders alike.

Vastey, who lived from 1781 to 1820, served as the most important secretary to Haiti's King Henry Christophe and wrote prolifically. Daut reads that body of work as the founding instance of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a mode of argument aimed squarely at the Enlightenment premises underwriting colonial rule.

The claim is one of priority. Taking apart colonial racism and the justifications for slavery is a project usually credited to the twentieth century, to W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, and Daut places Vastey at the head of that line rather than outside it. She reads him alongside those later figures and also among black Atlantic writers nearer his own time, including Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs.

The conclusion follows from the connections she draws: no account of how Afro-diasporic thought began holds together without him.

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.

Curtis and Mucher introduce the first English version of Haiti's earliest novel, written in exile on Saint Thomas by Emeric Bergeaud and published in Paris in 1859, a year after his death; his relative Beaubrun Ardouin arranged the printing, and the book never appeared in Haiti itself.

Bergeaud told his readers he had taken care not to disfigure history. His characters are invented, but the story they carry is the colony's transformation into an independent nation, related as a bloody and just fight whose sacrifice later generations are charged to remember. He wanted the appeal of fiction to reach people who would never study the annals, and he wanted to answer the hostile portraits of his country then in circulation.

The editors note that the little scholarship there is has dismissed the novel as derivative of French models, and argue that both the dismissals and the book deserve a fresh look.

Soden marks the release of a new handbook, Planning an Open Cities Mapping Project, by turning back to the volunteer work that inspired the team behind it. Writing more than four and a half years after the earthquake of January 12, 2010, he frames the OpenStreetMap response in Haiti as the earlier effort worth revisiting.

The text captured in this record breaks off there, so the specifics of his retrospective cannot be reported from it.

Three historians take up one problem from three vantage points: what happened after slavery ended, for the people freed, for those who had owned them, and for the societies that held both. The premise is that treating emancipation as the tidy close of an evil institution skips the harder part, the questions and struggles that opened once slavery was gone.

Holt works on Jamaica, where the contested meaning of citizenship became the ground on which freedom was defined and defined again. Scott follows southern Louisiana and Cuba, tracing tangled conflicts and the alliances that formed across racial lines. Cooper turns to French West Africa and the point where emancipation met imperial ambition.

A jointly written introduction pulls the cases together around citizenship, labor, and race in the years after emancipation, pointing toward a fuller reckoning with what freedom was taken to mean.

Liberalization has been among the most widely prescribed growth strategies in the developing world for three decades, and Haiti, like many of the least developed countries, has been applying it for twenty years. The condition Haitians live in now is reason enough, in Despeignes's view, to ask whether the neoliberal plan worked.

Agriculture is the test case, chosen because the sector is central to the Haitian economy, and the evaluation asks what opening trade did to farm output.

The answer is unfavourable on both counts. Trade liberalization has damaged Haitian agriculture rather than helped it, and the harm fell hardest on food crops — the portion of output that supplies income to the rural poor and underwrites food security. Nor did the anticipated offsetting gain appear: production of cash crops did not rise under liberalization either.

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.

Scott opens with three complaints from frustrated officials: Qing surveyors defeated by the mountains of Guizhou, British soldiers unable to pursue rebels into the Burmese hill jungle, and a missionary despairing of the creek-cut valleys of Appalachia. Each speaks for a project of rule that styled itself as order and enlightenment, and each was baffled by terrain and by people who would not hold still.

From that irritation he builds an argument about the long quarrel between lowland states and the peoples above them. Living without a state, he points out, has been the ordinary human condition; the grain-growing kingdoms of Southeast Asia were late, small and thinly populated, and a land-rich frontier meant that subjects who were pressed too hard could simply go. Flight set a practical limit on rulers, and the hills filled accordingly.

Only the modern state has had the means to close that frontier, a final enclosure carried out under the name of development.

In 1934 Haiti marked one hundred and thirty years as an independent republic. Smith takes that same year as the occasion of a second kind of Haitian independence, though the description available here breaks off before naming it.

Edited by Gaspar and Hine, this collection puts gender at the center of how slave societies worked. Its premise is that enslavement was never a single experience: men and women lived it differently, and women were exploited for their reproductive capacity as well as for their labor.

That difference extends to resistance. The volume holds that women appear rarely in accounts of revolt because their opposition took less confrontational forms, closer to the inventive daily work of surviving abuse and the denial of their humanity.

Sixteen contributors take up the subject, among them Hilary Beckles, Barbara Bush, David Barry Gaspar, David P. Geggus, Wilma King, Bernard Moitt, Claire Robertson, Susan M. Socolow, and Brenda E. Stevenson. Drew Faust, quoted in the publisher's notice, describes the book as filling a gap for scholars of women, slavery, and African American history.

Fick sets out to show how the outlook and the collective action of ordinary people shaped the revolution in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue and what followed it. The book moves from slavery and the forms of resistance that preceded 1791, through the risings in the north and the separate struggles of free people of colour, into a long treatment of the south, tracing the path from local revolt to civil war and independence.

Writing in the late 1980s, Fick connects that history to the mass mobilisations then spreading from Gonaives, Saint Marc and other provincial towns to the capital, and argues that leaderless popular organisation, not politicians or foreign patrons, brought down the dictatorship. Reconstruction, on this view, will come from rural knowledge and local forms of association or it will not come at all.

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.

Candler, an English Friend, travelled through Haiti at the beginning of 1841 and set his observations down for an abolitionist readership at home. He notes the long river that floats mahogany to the sea, the lakes and mineral springs, the ore left in the ground for want of capital, and the closed custom-house at Cap Haitien on the anniversary of independence.

There are no inns of the European sort, so travellers lodge as guests; he stays with a widow running a shop on the waterfront, and later takes rooms in the capital where merchants, planters and priests come to table. He calls on the country's principal ecclesiastic, who describes the church's revenues as thin.

Riding inland he finds pasture and provision grounds where cane once grew, and villages still ruined by bombardment. Passing the bay where Leclerc's and Rochambeau's men drowned their prisoners, he asks who has the better claim to charge the other with cruelty.

Swanson introduces and prints for the first time two letters of 1816 by Stephen Grellet, a Limoges nobleman's son who fled the French Revolution, lost his religion in Demerara, and became a Quaker minister in the United States. Addressed to William Allen and George Stacey, they describe three months spent travelling in Petion's southern republic.

The introduction sets the trip in its Atlantic context: a Black state whose victory had hardened proslavery opinion abroad, an island split between a kingdom in the north and a republic in the south, and an abolitionist movement then under sustained attack. Grellet says almost nothing of that internal conflict. He judged Haitians favourably, blamed what offended him on French irreligion and on the local clergy, and held that instruction and material help would make the country exemplary.

Swanson argues that the letters, passed over by the nineteenth-century biographies built from Grellet's now-lost journal, show something the journal cannot.

Childs reconstructs the decade in which several thousand French exiles made temporary homes in American cities, and begins by separating two very different movements. The voluntary emigration of 1789 he treats harshly, as the flight of privileged men who did their own cause no good abroad. The far larger departure after 1791 he treats sympathetically: reforming nobles, bourgeois, priests alienated by the Civil Constitution, and officers still loyal to France, most of whom left because remaining meant prison or the scaffold. Almost all who reached the United States came from this second group.

A separate stream came from the Caribbean. Childs narrates the quarrel between Galbaud and the civil commissioners at Le Cap in June 1793, the burning of the town, and the overloaded fleet that carried some ten thousand refugees to the Chesapeake.

He then follows the exiles ashore, from the Orleans princes making their way to New Orleans to obscurer emigres waiting on news from home.

The document collected here is the royal edict of 1685, issued under Louis XIV and printed in the 1687 Paris volume on the policing of France's American islands. Later decrees adjusted particular articles, but this first version laid down the framework that governed slavery in the French colonies until 1789.

Its opening article expels all Jews from the colonies; in the Dutch Caribbean they held a real if secondary commercial position, while under French rule they could own neither property nor enslaved people. The edict likewise requires that enslaved people be instructed as Catholics rather than Protestants.

Most of the code, however, is given over to fixing the legal condition of slavery — inherited through the mother, not the father — and to tight regulation of the conduct of the enslaved, who are left with almost nothing in the way of rights. Masters, for their part, are directed to provide for the sick and the old.

King takes up the years before 1791 in the life of the man who did most to make the insurrection succeed. Older accounts cast Toussaint as a coachman still enslaved on the Breda estate; that picture has given way since Debien noticed his absence from the plantation's slave lists, and King works from documents that show him free well before the revolution.

What that freedom looked like is the substance of the article. Toussaint belonged among the libres de savane, people free in practice whose manumission was never registered, and who used notaries to shore up a status the law left precarious. He leased and sold land at Haut-du-Cap, held slaves, and had a solid tile-roofed house built for his wife.

Rather than treat this as a discrediting fact, King places him beside slaveholding revolutionaries in Virginia, arguing that in a plantation colony ambition led inevitably to owning people, and that what matters is what a man transcends.