Buck-Morss argues every reading European knew about Haiti

Joseph identifies the article that shifted the geography of reason in this field. Published in Critical Inquiry in 2000 and later extended into a book in 2009, Susan Buck-Morss's work contends that the events of revolutionary Haiti distinctively inspired the young Hegel in developing the lord and servant dialectic, and gave him concrete experimental material for theorising freedom and the process of history. She also holds that the revolution contributed substantially to European critical discourse on subjectivity, freedom, identity and consciousness. Joseph relays her evidence that although news of the revolution was censored in the French press after 1803, newspapers and journals in Britain, and also in the United States and Poland, carried the final revolutionary struggle in Saint-Domingue, and her conclusion that the revolution was the trial by fire of French Enlightenment ideals and that the reading bourgeois public knew it. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

In the early hours of 17 December 2001 about thirty heavily armed men drove pickup trucks into the grounds of the national palace in Port-au-Prince. Jean Bertrand Aristide and his family were at their private house in Tabarre and were unhurt. Presidential security, a police tactical unit and large crowds of the street groups known as chimeres drove the attackers out. Eight people died, five of them among the attackers. A former soldier named Pierre Richardson was caught at Terre Rouge and told reporters that the operation had been planned in the Dominican Republic by Guy Philippe and two other former officers, and that the opposition coalition had no part in it. Lavalas crowds burned the headquarters of Convergence Democratique and three other party buildings and set fire to the homes of Gerard Pierre-Charles and Victor Benoit. The opposition then argued that the government had staged the attack to make exactly that possible.

Seymour Drescher published a study of Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic slave trade in 2001 and attached a figure to the question. It is unlikely, he wrote, that more than a fraction of one percent of the twelve million Africans enslaved and relayed across the ocean were bought or sold by Jewish merchants even once. At no point along the chain of that trade were Jews numerous, wealthy or powerful enough to affect its structure or its flow, or to lessen the suffering of the people carried in it. The number matters because a very large claim had been made in the opposite direction and had spread widely. One percent of twelve million would be a hundred and twenty thousand people, and the estimate is that the real share fell well below even that. Schorsch reaches the same conclusion from a different direction, finding Jewish slave owning and slave trading minimal in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean alike.

Famine became the standing image of modern Africa, and by the 1970s many states were importing the staples they had once grown. Sub-Saharan Africa combined the fastest population growth outside the West with the slowest growth in food production. Three explanations get offered. Climate is one, since Sahel rainfall stayed low through the 1970s and 1980s. Pressure on fragile land is another. The third is political, and it does most of the work, because in a great many famines the volume of food does not fall at all. What changes is price, distribution and who holds a claim on a share. War causes famine and famine feeds war. Zimbabwe kept grain reserves through the 1980s and had food security because of them; structural adjustment called reserves a distortion of the market, the government sold them for foreign exchange, and when the rains failed in the 1990s the silos were empty. Mugabe then withheld relief from districts that voted against him.