Haiti's foreign office admits it never occupied Navassa

Navassa is a waterless limestone rock between Haiti and Jamaica that American companies had begun mining for guano under a United States statute claiming unoccupied guano islands. Haiti held that the island was Haitian. In internal correspondence, the Haitian foreign secretary Ethéart told the minister Preston what the government would not say in public: Haiti had never occupied Navassa in any official way. He argued that the emptiness left the claim intact and explained it as the result of internal troubles and of the plain inability of successive governments to keep a garrison or any establishment on a barren rock offshore. The explanation was true and it was fatal. Washington's position was that sovereignty over such places follows actual occupation, and here was Haiti's own foreign office, in writing, conceding the one fact that mattered. A state too disordered to post ten men on an island loses the island, and the rule was written by the country that wanted it.

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.

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.

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.