Geggus argues Vodou and marronage did little for the revolution

Joseph reports a set of claims that remain contested. In the collection assembled from a conference held at the John Carter Brown Library in 2004 for Haiti's bicentennial and published in 2009, David Geggus restates positions from his earlier work. He holds that the indigenous religion played a minor role in the revolution's success, against Fouchard, Laguerre, Hurbon, Dubois, Fick and Price-Mars; he downplays maroon resistance as an influence, finding it unhelpful to Haitian independence; he maintains that despite the connections between marronage and earlier uprisings documented by Fouchard, no large-scale revolts or conspiracies by the enslaved existed before the general revolt of 1791; and he rejects the consensus about conditions after 1750. Joseph calls these issues controversial and urges further research. In the same volume Carolyn Fick argues the African-born supplied grassroots leadership at every stage, especially in the war of independence of 1802 and 1803. Where this account departs from the standard one: Records Geggus denying that Vodou and marronage were significant causes of the revolution and denying any large-scale slave revolt before 1791, against the dominant Haitian scholarship.

In 2007 the Dominican electoral board created a separate civil register for foreigners, known as the Book of Foreigners or the pink registers. A child born in a Dominican hospital to parents who cannot show legal status is given a pink birth certificate and entered in that book. It is a document, and it is not citizenship: people registered in it cannot vote. In the same year the board issued a circular, also called Resolution 12, instructing registry officers to stop issuing identity papers to children of foreign parents whose births had been recorded irregularly. Adults who needed their own birth certificates to enrol at a university found them refused. Whether a father had used a ficha, the identity card handed out by a sugar mill, to register a birth years earlier became the mark that flagged a family. Thousands of people born in the country were left stateless while officials audited their papers.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot died in Chicago in July 2012. He was born in Port-au-Prince into a family of historians, left Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship, and spent his career in American universities, the last of them the University of Chicago. His first book, written in Haitian Creole in 1977, retold the revolution for readers who spoke the language the revolution was fought in. Haiti: State Against Nation, published in 1990, described a state sitting on top of a peasantry it taxed and did not serve. Silencing the Past, published in 1995, is the work that travelled furthest. It argued that power enters the record long before any historian arrives, at the moment a fact is made, filed, retrieved and finally told as a story, and that the revolution in Saint-Domingue was unthinkable to the Europeans who had to write it down. Scholars in fields with no interest in Haiti now use his terms to ask who kept the documents and what was never written at all.

The debt began with loans taken in the 1960s and 1970s for projects that never paid, and compounded when governments borrowed again to service what they already owed. Export prices fell, terms of trade worsened, and states lost the revenue to run themselves. Africa's total debt went from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion by 1997, and interest on unpaid arrears took a growing share of national output that would otherwise have gone to schools and clinics. Western aid averaging 12 billion dollars a year through the 1990s was a stopgap, and it gave the donors an unprecedented voice in the internal policy of sovereign countries. The money came with conditions attached: liberalise, privatise, cut state spending on health and education. The campaign to cancel the debt was the newest in a line of public causes that began with the movement to abolish the slave trade, and like the missionary appeals of the nineteenth century it treated the continent as a condition to be corrected.