Trouillot writes the first history of the revolution in Kreyol

Trouillot published his first book just after leaving Haiti for the United States to escape the dictatorship. It is the first history of the revolution written in Kreyol, and it mixes historiography, social science, Marxist analysis, political science, fiction and the oral modes of Haitian storytelling, proverbs, drawings and songs. Chapters open with verse or Vodou prayers, and the text addresses its readers with the pronoun that means you and we at once. The article argues the form does argumentative work, since the circular and repeated lines of Vodou song encourage memorisation and carry multiple meanings simultaneously. The consequence of writing this way was obscurity abroad. The book circulated narrowly, went out of print for decades and was translated into English only in 2021, by which time diaspora Haitians might need study to read it.

The depression of the 1970s cut agricultural production and investment in Haiti. World demand for commodities was falling, and the Duvalier government had no agricultural policy that might have absorbed the shock. In 1977 the opposition newspaper Le Patriote Haitien, published by exiles, reported that seventy five people in the Northwest Department of Haiti had died of starvation and disease inside two days, and that a number of students at Cap-Haitien, the country's second city, had fallen ill with tuberculosis. The Northwest is the driest part of Haiti. When the same depression came back in the late 1980s it produced famine there again, and thousands left by boat for the United States and for other islands of the Caribbean. Pierre-Louis lists the economic crisis as the second of three things that turned Haitian migration into a mass movement, after the election of Francois Duvalier and before the drive against the peasantry under his son.

Drought settled over the Sahel from the early 1970s and held, from Mauritania and Mali east to Sudan and Ethiopia. Famine followed, and it fell on countries already fighting civil wars or moving their own farmers by force. By the 1980s agriculture sat at the centre of the crisis. Several states had become net importers of food and depended on aid to buy it. Land grew scarce, farmers pushed into pasture and into ground that made them ill, and herders and cultivators fought over what was left. The young left for the cities, and slums spread around Lagos, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Political sovereignty had arrived without economic sovereignty. Populations watched their governing elites take what there was, welcomed the coups of the 1960s and 1970s, then watched the soldiers fail as well. By the early 1990s governments were accepting structural adjustment from the IMF and the World Bank: shrink the state, free trade and currency, and take instruction on the rest.

Irving Rouse spent four decades building the framework that Caribbean archaeology still argues with. On his model the Boca Chica pottery style began in the southern Dominican Republic and reached Puerto Rico with Chican potters who set up colonies on the southern coast, and local groups there developed the Capa and Esperanza styles under that influence. Influence in this account runs one way, from a source to a periphery, and the resulting style zones become the boundaries of indigenous provinces on the map. Later work reads the same pottery differently. The styles look like the product of traffic in both directions across the Mona Passage, where people, goods and marriages moved between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico for centuries. The dispute is about method as much as about pots. A decorated vessel records what a potter had seen and whose work she admired, and turning that into a claim about which people lived where, and who counted as whom, is a longer leap than the evidence supports.