An oil embargo, seven thousand boat people and a name nobody wanted

A hundred thousand Haitians marched for Aristide in New York on 11 October 1991. The OAS imposed an oil and trade embargo on 23 October and George Bush ordered American compliance on 5 November. Haiti held no strategic fuel reserve and could not last many days without imports. Boats began leaving again, and nearly seven thousand people were picked up at sea within two months. Washington would not hand them straight back to the officers it had just condemned, so it opened a camp at Guantanamo Bay, which reached twelve thousand five hundred people and could grow no further. Talks in Cartagena turned on the office of prime minister, which under the 1987 constitution carried the working power while the president was head of state. Aristide's term ran five years and could not be renewed, so every month in exile was a month spent. The negotiators settled on Rene Theodore and Aristide agreed on 8 January 1992. Within the month a bodyguard was killed, Theodore himself was beaten, and the nomination died.

Joseph is careful about priority in the debate that now dominates Haitian revolutionary studies. In a Sorbonne dissertation of 1989 titled Hegel, critique de l'Afrique, Pierre-Franklin Tavares argued that the revolution in Saint-Domingue and the birth of Haiti, taken as a double event, were the principal historical source, though not the only one, of the famous figure of consciousness entitled domination and bondage in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a figure Tavares follows Kojeve in saying is improperly called the dialectic of master and slave. Joseph presents Susan Buck-Morss's later work as building on this thesis, and notes that Tavares extended his argument in further studies on Hegel and the Abbe Gregoire and on Hegel as an anti-slavery philosopher, including a lecture at the College de France in January 1996. The point restores a francophone genealogy to an argument usually credited to an American book. Where this account departs from the standard one: Assigns the Hegel and Haiti thesis first to Tavares in 1989, ahead of the Buck-Morss article of 2000 with which it is usually identified.

Alerte Belance sold in a Port au Prince market and had organised her neighbourhood for Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidential campaign. After the coup of September 1991 the paramilitaries of the group known as FRAPH taunted her as the godmother of the militants, and she spent two years moving between hiding places. The Governors Island accord signed in New York promised that the president would come back on 30 October 1993, so she came out. Men seized her on 15 October and took her to Titanyen, the killing ground north of the capital, where they cut her apart with machetes. They cut out part of her tongue, took the gums, teeth and jaw on her right side, opened her face, her eye and her ear, severed her right arm and cut the fingertips from her left hand. She woke in the brush the next morning, dragged herself to the roadside and raised the stump of her arm so a passing driver would see she was alive. She was thirty two and had three children.

In March 1995 the council of the American Historical Association issued a policy resolution on Jews and the slave trade, decrying the misuse of historical evidence in the claim that Jewish merchants had dominated the Atlantic traffic in enslaved Africans. A learned society putting its name to a statement about a specific factual claim is unusual, and it shows how far this argument had travelled outside the seminar room. The resolution sat alongside a body of published rebuttal. David Brion Davis wrote on Jews in the slave trade in Culturefront in 1992 and again in the New York Review of Books in December 1994, and Eli Faber published a book setting out the records in 1998. The quarrel had begun on college campuses in the late 1980s. Within seven years it had produced a formal resolution from the main professional body of American historians.