Haitian cities have been rebuilt after earthquakes before

Port-au-Prince was rebuilt in 1751 and again in 1770 after earthquakes, and Cap-Haitien was rebuilt in 1842 after the shock that wrecked the northern coast. Earthquakes and volcanic activity are ordinary in this part of the Caribbean, alongside the storms whose English name comes from the Taino word hurakan. Bellegarde-Smith raises the earlier rebuildings to make a point about capacity. Haitian governments had passed laws on construction. Over two centuries the state grew weaker rather than stronger, and rules about how a building is put up mean nothing when there is nobody left to enforce them. That is the sense in which he calls the disaster of January 2010 man made, in the way the flooding of New Orleans in 2005 was man made. More than sixty per cent of Port-au-Prince came down in that earthquake, along with large parts of Leogane and Jacmel, and two hundred and six years of government records were buried with the ministries.

Francois Makandal, a Muslim from Guinea, became the best known of the maroon leaders in 1757. He prophesied that the white masters would be wiped out. He spread terror among them by preparing poisons that killed slowly, and he supplied rebellious slaves with talismans called garde-corps, which were held to make the wearer invulnerable to weapons and to remove all fear of white people. Several groups of maroons were said to be under his command. His name outlived him in the language of the colony. Makandal became the general word in Saint-Domingue for a talisman or a poison, and later for the ceremonies in which such charms were made. That linguistic afterlife is the measure of what he achieved. A man who has been executed can still be a working category in the vocabulary of the people who executed him, and every planter who used the word was repeating his name without meaning to.

On 1 August 1838 the abolition of slavery took full effect on the British island of Dominica and roughly fourteen thousand people stopped being property. An interim period of apprenticeship had run from 1834 and was supposed to ease owners and slaves into the new arrangement. It settled nothing. Dominica registered one of the lowest ratios of enslaved people to land anywhere in the British Caribbean, and for ecological and historical reasons the plantation had never dominated the island the way it dominated the older sugar colonies. Planters and officials could see what abundant land would mean, and from 1834 they had already brought in severe measures to keep apprentices on the estates. Once apprenticeship ended they used every method available to stop cultivators establishing holdings of their own. Most of the freed people could not read, and they spoke a French based creole rather than English, a survival from the period before Britain took the island in 1763. The fight over land and labour ran on for a century.

Dubois narrates the execution as a piece of theatre that failed. In January 1758 a fugitive named Makandal was made to kneel in a plaza at Le Cap wearing a placard naming him a seducer, profaner and poisoner. He was tied to a post and a fire lit beneath him. As the flames reached him he struggled, the post gave way, and the Black onlookers shouted that Makandal was saved. Panic broke out, soldiers cleared the plaza, and he was strapped to a board and thrown back into the fire. He had often claimed he could change shape and had said before his death that he would become a fly to escape the flames. Few actually saw him die, and many believed he had returned to the hills to plan another rebellion. Dubois notes his occasional invocation of Allah. Where this account departs from the standard one: Dates the execution to January 1758 and describes a botched burning, against accounts that have him simply executed on the square.