Also known as: Haiti Aftershocks of History, Dubois Aftershocks, Laurent Dubois Aftershocks
Last updated: April 16, 2026
The most comprehensive single-volume narrative of Haitian history from 1804 to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, organized around the argument that Haiti's poverty and instability are not cultural failures but the predictable outcome of specific historical decisions: the 1825 indemnity, the US occupation, Duvalierist extraction, and structural adjustment. Dubois traces these overlapping aftershocks while also recovering the counter-plantation system — the lakou, market networks, and Vodou infrastructure — that the peasant majority built in resistance to each successive extraction regime. The book is the essential long-arc companion to Trouillot's structural analysis and Casimir's peasant-autonomy framework.
Dubois treats Soulouque as a figure whose reign was distorted by racist European caricature as much as by his own authoritarianism — making him a test case for how foreign writing denied the legitimacy of Black sovereignty.
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Laurent Dubois. "Haiti: The Aftershocks of History." Metropolitan Books, 2012. Rasin.ai, https://rasin.ai/connections/sources/dubois-haiti-aftershocks. Accessed 2026-05-05.