An inaugural speech admits that Dominica has a class of peasant proprietors

Alexander W. Moir gave his inaugural speech as the newly arrived chief executive of Dominica to the local assembly on 25 July 1872. He asked how an island with over twenty seven thousand inhabitants could leave so much land uncultivated, and supplied his own answer: the evil of squatting was not unknown, and a commendable and rapidly increasing class of peasant proprietors was in existence, which left men free of the necessity to labour and able to give or withhold their work at pleasure. It was the first acknowledgment by a Dominican official that the island had a peasantry and that the peasantry owned land. His audience was the shrinking group of immigrant planters and the coloured elite who controlled the elected House, a group London had decided needed supervision. The Colonial Office had just folded Dominica into the federal colony of the Leeward Islands and Moir was the first executive under the new title. His presidency lasted less than a year.

Between 1868 and 1877 descendants of the refugees who had left Saint Domingue held elected office across the American South. F. H. Fyall sat in the Georgia House in 1868. George L. Fayerman sat in the Virginia House from 1869 to 1871. Robert C. DeLarge and Alonzo J. Ransier both sat in the South Carolina House from 1868 to 1870 and then went to the United States House of Representatives, DeLarge from 1871 to 1873 and Ransier from 1873 to 1875. Felix C. Antoine sat in the Louisiana House and Cesar C. Antoine in the Louisiana Senate, both from 1868 to 1872. Cesar Antoine then served as lieutenant governor of Louisiana from 1872 to 1876 and Richard H. Gleaves as lieutenant governor of South Carolina from 1872 to 1877. The generation that lost these seats is the one that organised the challenge to segregation in New Orleans.

Monseigneur Guilloux was archbishop of Port-au-Prince from 1870 to 1885, and he wrote that the numerous parishes deprived of priests were crying out for pastors, each competing to be first to have its own curate, and that satisfying them all proved impossible. He read the demand as evidence of Catholic hunger. By the time he arrived the Church had been present in the territory for the whole history of slavery, and the population already held its own reading of Christianity, in which the rites, the saints and the symbols had long been annexed to the purposes of Vodou. Masses and ceremonies for the dead sat inside the framework of Vodou religious life. Being Catholic and serving the spirits became a single reality that still marks the country. Only a thin layer of privileged families entered the assimilation the missionaries had in mind.

In the late nineteenth century the slave trades reached far enough inland in East Africa to break up the Shambaa kingdom, the Gweno kingdom and the Pare states in the Pangani valley. This was two generations after Britain outlawed its own Atlantic traffic and while abolition was being celebrated in Europe. The Indian Ocean and Red Sea trades were still running. What happened in the valley followed a pattern seen across the continent. Raiding between neighbouring communities made weapons necessary for self defence, weapons came from traders in exchange for captives, and the need for captives drove further raiding. Historians call the loop the gun slave cycle. Its political result was the collapse of existing government and its replacement by armed bands, together with the corruption of the courts, since a community could meet a tribute demand by convicting its own members and selling them.