Readings: Atlas of Haiti

Summary

This review assesses the Atlas d'Haïti published by CEGET, an ambitious national atlas produced primarily by a French team given Haiti's resource constraints. The atlas is praised for its exhaustive compilation of data, high cartographic quality, and detailed explanatory notes, positioning it as an indispensable long-term reference. However, the review argues that the work ultimately falls short of its own stated goal—to offer a clear synthetic image of Haitian space, its specificities, and the acute challenges of this least-developed country. The critique points to the overly classical compartmentalized structure (history, physical data, population, economic sectors, etc.), which leads to fragmentation: crucial links, such as between food-crop systems and rural development or geomorphology, are lost across scattered plates. While the layout facilitated work among 26 authors and provides a useful mine of information, it lacks the integrative demonstration of cartographic analysis. The reviewer regrets that the atlas did not emulate Christian Girault’s thesis approach—tracing the coffee commodity chain to reveal how networks of wealth and power structure society and space. Missing are maps of such networks, the impasse of the peasantry combining erosion, overpopulation and emigration, or the economic/political/religious control networks. Ultimately, the atlas remains an inventory rather than a powerful spatial analysis of development problems, yielding an impression of dissatisfaction despite its considerable scholarship. The conclusion calls for a more problem-driven, synthetic cartographic demonstration that would fully correspond to the ambition of researching the spatial dimension of national reality.