Portraits of Haiti's rulers hang in a segregated display

After a small showing at the Boston exhibition of 1883, the Salomon government was represented more prominently at the world's industrial and cotton centennial in New Orleans, an event marking a century since the earliest recorded American cotton export. Seventeen paintings by the artist Louis Rigaud of Haitian presidents and generals, first shown at the 1881 fair, travelled there to be hung in the Colored People's Exposition, a segregated display whose theme was Haiti. The subjects ran from Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines through Christophe, Petion, Boyer and Soulouque to Salomon himself. In 1885 the portraits were sent to the Smithsonian, where St. Hubert notes they remain, even though the standard bibliography of world's fairs held by the same institution omits the Haitian exhibition of 1881 and the Haitian holdings from Boston and New Orleans. Where this account departs from the standard one: The dissertation points out that Haiti's expositions are missing from the Smithsonian's own reference work on world's fairs while those of seven other Latin American, Caribbean and African territories are listed.

Baptist missionaries reached the lower Congo in 1878 and 1879 and were welcomed at Sao Salvador by Pedro V. They built their church beside the ruined cathedral and in the early 1890s took stones from it for the walls, which to Kongolese eyes implied a continuity the Europeans did not intend, since the ruins were still the burial ground of generations of rulers and the central shrine of the kingdom. In August 1885 Henry Richards wrote from the station at Mbanza Manteke that the people were coming up in such numbers that services had moved outdoors and that more than seven hundred had converted, with a mass burning of images. Something similar happened at Sao Salvador a year later. The men who carried the new preaching outward included a blacksmith called Dom Miguel Ndelengeni and a young man at Stanley Pool named Ntoni, which is the Kongolese form of Anthony.

Arnold Toynbee, lecturing in 1884, produced the analysis of the industrial revolution that later writers worked from. Its essence for him was the replacement of medieval regulation by competition, which made the revolution a social event before it was an economic one. Eighty years later Ronald Hartwell defined the essential character of the same thing quite differently, as a sustained rise in the rate of growth of total and per head output at a pace that broke with everything before it. The two definitions travel together in most accounts, since freedom from old constraints was supposed to produce the growth. In the twentieth century the growth half took over, because every new state in the world was being told that the road to wealth ran through an industrial revolution of its own. Haiti heard that advice as often as anyone, and the word revolution in it carries this nineteenth century English cargo.

In 1885 the Haitian writer and diplomat Antenor Firmin published On the Equality of the Human Races, written against the racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau. Firmin argued that the Haitian people stood as a lighthouse for black people across the Americas and in Africa, because of the revolution that had ended slavery there. Vodou had no place in what he was defending. His purpose was to demonstrate that Haitians were a civilised people, and the argument left the opposition between barbarism and civilisation standing exactly where the anthropology of his century had put it. Hurbon treats the omission as the shape of a much longer problem. The educated minority spoke for Haiti abroad while the religion of the rural majority was kept at the edge of national life, and after a century the marginalising felt normal to the people doing it.