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This book is a micro-level study of one plantation in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), situated on the Cul de Sac Plain, near Port au Prince. The sugar economy of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue produced profits for planters and merchants, but it was based upon social, political, ecological, and market foundations that rendered it weak and crisis-prone. Socially, it was based upon the importation of forced labor that was the source of profit, but that also limited the incentive for technical innovation and constantly posed the threat of violent revolt; politically, it was built upon a collaboration between metropolitan and creole elites that evinced many of the conflicts characteristic of old regime French society; ecologically, the sugar islands of the Antilles were rich places subject to declining soil fertility and periodic crises that ruined crops and weakened slave populations; and the markets that the plantations of Saint-Domingue served were frequently interrupted by warfare, which affected every aspect of plantation life, including the possibility of continuous investment and improvement. Planters and administrators were aware of these shortcomings but the demands of global markets, the politics of old regime states, and the patrimonial logic that guided the families who invested in these plantations excluded meaningful reform of the plantation complex, let alone the search for alternatives. Even beyond the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue, planters, administrators, and metropolitan politicians struggled to maintain the plantation complex for the production of tropical export commodities.

In the early fall of 1897, yellow fever shuttered businesses, paralyzed trade, and caused tens of thousands of people living in the southern United States to abandon their homes and flee for their lives. Originating in Cuba, the deadly plague inspired disease-control measures that not only protected U.S. trade interests, but also justified the political and economic domination of the island nation from which the pestilence came. By focusing on yellow fever, this book uncovers for the first time how the devastating power of this virus profoundly shaped the relationship between the two countries. It demonstrates that yellow fever in Cuba motivated the United States to declare war against Spain in 1898, and, after the war was won and the disease eradicated, the United States demanded that Cuba pledge in its new constitution to maintain the sanitation standards established during the occupation. By situating the history of the fight against yellow fever within its political, military, and economic context, the book reveals that the U.S. program of sanitation and disease control in Cuba was not a charitable endeavor. Instead, it shows that it was an exercise in colonial public health that served to eliminate threats to the continued expansion of U.S. influence in the world.

The only truly successful slave uprising in the Atlantic world, the Haitian Revolution, gave birth to the first independent black republic of the modern era. Inspired by the revolution that had recently roiled their French rulers, black slaves and people of mixed race alike rose up against their oppressors in a bloody insurrection that led to the burning of the colony's largest city, a bitter struggle against Napoleon's troops, and in 1804, the founding of a free nation. Numerous firsthand narratives of these events survived, but their insights into the period have long languished in obscurity—until now. This book unearths these documents and presents excerpts from more than a dozen accounts written by white colonists trying to come to grips with a world that had suddenly disintegrated. These writings give us our most direct portrayal of the actions of the revolutionaries, depicting encounters with the uprising's leaders—Toussaint Louverture, Boukman, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines—as well as putting faces on many of the anonymous participants in this epochal moment. The commentary provided here on each selection presents the necessary background about the authors and the incidents they describe, while also addressing the complex question of the witnesses' reliability and urging the reader to consider the implications of the narrators' perspectives. Along with the American and French revolutions, the birth of Haiti helped shape the modern world.

This book explores the US film industry’s presence and influence in Havana, Cuba during the first six decades of the 20th century. Especially beginning in the 1920s, Hollywood dominated the film business in Havana, where movie theaters, fanzines, and film columns multiplied prodigiously. But Hollywood’s reign did not affect any simple “Americanization” of Havana audiences, seduced into consent to the US imperial hegemony that so profoundly shaped life in Cuba before the 1959 Revolution. Instead, Hollywood in Havana finds that Cuban audiences, cultural arbiters, and men and women working in the local film business community engaged actively and complexly with Hollywood. They appropriated Hollywood content into the local context, and interacted with Hollywood business practices, in ways that fomented revolutionary Cuban nationalism, including its defining insistence upon national sovereignty, its celebration of freedom-fighting masculinity, and its profound ambivalence about the United States, which served as both an inspiring model of a prosperous democracy and a looming threat to Cuban sovereignty, democracy, and prosperity. Cubans found ample fuel for this ambivalence especially in films by leftist Hollywood filmmakers, who celebrated the United States’ democratic idealism and freedom-loving heroes but also offered compelling critiques of US failures and flaws, including its racial and socioeconomic inequality as well as its (extraterritorial) greed. Hollywood in Havana finds that Cuban film critics, moviegoers, and even revolutionary activists engaged in an ongoing dialogue with Hollywood that fueled Cubans’ demands for true independence and uncorrupted democracy, and even their willingness to raise arms towards those ends.

Three decades of epistemological “revolutions” in the humanities and the social sciences seem to have spared no 19th-century concept. The very idea of Latin America, however, remains uncontested, firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and racial meanings. But Latin America has never designated a geographically or historically tangible reality with any empirical or conceptual rigor. The book is, first, a conceptual history of the term “Latin America” in its natural historical habitat --mid-19th-century re-definitions of empire and the cultural, political, and economic interactions among intellectuals in the Spanish-, Portuguese-, French-, Catalan-, English-, German-, and Italian-speaking worlds. Second, the book constitutes a critique of the most powerful form of current “Latin Americanism,” namely, that which circulates in U.S.-based humanities and social sciences. Finally, the book advances a detailed proposal of what to do today with a seemingly inalienable term in the writing and teaching of history.

The Singer’s Needle looks at the relationship between form, subject-formation and power in three historical settings in twentieth century Panama. It analyzes the Liberal reform and its aftermath (1912-1935) by looking at the flagship of its punitive apparatus: the penal colony on the Island of Coiba. It then examines the rule of José Antonio Remón and the judicial drama that followed his assassination (1947-58). Finally, it explores the “disappearance” of Father Héctor Gallego, a radical who transformed the mountainous region of Santa Fe (1966-72). The book argues that in these three historical settings, forms of writing and symbolic social behavior were crucial for the maintenance of power relations or their undoing. Extending Michel Foucault’s notion that power and knowledge are tied, the book grapples with the question of how to write about power formations without becoming complicit in their functioning. Written as a pastiche of traditional history and prose fiction, the book juxtaposes various interpretative and aesthetic frameworks and brings to the surface of the text various layers of historical meaning. This approach offers new insights into the nature of subjectivity and the role that historical narratives themselves play in perpetuating regimes of knowledge and power, while deconstructing the role of authorship in the text itself.