A minute of shaking kills at least one person in thirty

Just before five in the afternoon on 12 January 2010 a fault line near Port-au-Prince produced a shallow earthquake of magnitude 7.0. In under a minute buildings collapsed across a metropolitan region holding more than three million people. Estimates of the dead run from 100,000 to 316,000, which is at least one person in every thirty living in the affected area. Most were trapped in the rubble or killed outright by the blunt force of concrete coming down on them. Engineers who examined the wreckage listed the failures. Soil liquefied under some buildings. Top heavy structures toppled sideways. Thin corroded reinforcement bars bent and twisted. Concrete block walls that had never been tied into corner support beams simply fell away. Poor quality concrete crumbled into rubble under the pressure. Every one of those failures had a history behind it that was decades old on the morning it mattered.

Human rights organisations inside and outside the Dominican Republic argued that stripping citizenship by circular contradicted the constitution itself. In 2010 the country adopted a new constitution which says that children of foreigners in transit or living illegally in the territory are not citizens by birth. The founding document was thereby brought into line with the migration law of 2004 and with what registry offices had already been doing. The same constitution created a Constitutional Court of thirteen judges charged with enforcing constitutional justice. Because the audit of the civil registry ran backwards, a birth recorded in 1983 could be suspended under a rule written in 2010, and the government also kept the Book of Foreigners for Dominicans of Haitian descent who could not prove their parents were legally resident. Generations of children born in the country are entered in it at birth.

Johnson assembled fifteen printed world history textbooks with editions published across a five year window, gathering the information through scholars on social media. One contained no mention of the Haitian Revolution at all, three gave it less than a page, and four gave it four pages or more, which she reads as an overall increase in space since the earlier survey. Her more pointed finding concerns who writes these books. Only three had authors specialising in any aspect of Latin American history and only five had authors whose research concentrates on African history, while the largest group of contributors specialised in Asian history. She notes that many authors came from elite institutions and that several were late in their careers or had died since a first edition, and argues that early career scholars at teaching-focused institutions are largely absent.

Philip DeArmond Curtin died in 2009. Eltis and Richardson name his work as the foundation their atlas of the transatlantic slave trade rests on. Before Curtin, the scale of the traffic was handled with round figures that travelled by repetition, some running to twenty million and more, none of them tied to a document anyone could inspect. Curtin went to the shipping records and produced an estimate with its method attached, so that every scholar afterward could argue with his total by arguing with his sources. That is what made the field cumulative instead of rhetorical. The voyage database behind the atlas, with its record of individual ships, ports, owners and mortality, exists because he established that counting was possible and that a count could be corrected. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because Saint-Domingue took in hundreds of thousands of captives in its last fifty years, and the size of that traffic explains both why the colony was rich and why it went up.