The New York Times describes the interior of Haiti

In 1888 the New York Times told its readers that a revolution would be welcomed with fierce joy by what it called the black savages of the interior, who stood ready at the first signal to come down on the towns and, maddened by rum, to commit every outrage imaginable. The same paper later described a highly emotional population with little beyond tribal rule and superstition to guide it, and therefore open to demagogues. Bellegarde-Smith sets those sentences beside the New York Times of 2010, whose columnists explained the country through cultural inferiority and the influence of Vodou, and beside a Wall Street Journal piece of the same year resting on the claim that culture matters and race does not. He treats the vocabulary as the visible surface of a colonial discourse running since the late eighteenth century, and notes that the paper had kept a resident correspondent in Haiti from the late nineteenth century into the late 1950s.

Hyppolite came to power after leading a coup against Francois Legitime and made his name with commerce and public works, installing telegraph lines, building wharves and digging canals. St. Hubert explains why he chose Douglass for Chicago. Douglass had served as United States minister to Haiti in these years and had consistently supported the country and worked to preserve its sovereignty, at a time when American pressure for a naval station at the Mole Saint-Nicolas collided with that sovereignty. In a speech after his election Hyppolite denied that he had promised to cede the Mole. The appointment therefore placed at the head of Haiti's delegation a black American who had declined to serve his own government's territorial ambition, which is part of what made the pavilion legible as a political statement.

On 4 November 1892 the women soldiers of Dahomey fought the French army at the gates of Cana. It was their last battle. The kingdom fell, and the French abolished the Dahomean monarchy in 1900. The date of the ending is exact, which is unusual, and the date of the beginning is not. Claims in the literature run from the reign of Wegbaja, who ruled somewhere between about 1640 and the early 1680s, to that of Glele, who ruled from 1858 to 1889. Most writers have credited either Agaja, king in the 1720s and 1730s, or Gezo, king from 1818 to 1858. Amelie Degbelo, who interviewed scores of Dahomeans for a thesis, found that ninety nine of every hundred named Gezo. He certainly enlarged the corps, hardened its training and armed it better. The women were called amazons by Europeans, and they were the standing infantry of a West African state.

Cultivators rioted at the village of La Plaine in Dominica in 1893. Coloured politicians were at the same time protesting about abuses of executive power, and the Crown appointed Sir Robert G. C. Hamilton to inquire into the island's affairs. His report appeared in 1894 and treated the peasantry as an established class of owner occupiers, produced by the demands of the labourers and by the planters' own inability to keep their estates in order after slavery ended. Hamilton wrote that this class had turned its attention mainly to growing what Dominicans called provisions. His favourite phrase was peasant proprietor. The cultivators did not use it. In the list of grievances the La Plaine district sent him they called themselves the small landowners, and elsewhere they said small owner, small proprietor or simply small man. One planter told the inquiry that a labourer stops developing the moment he becomes a peasant proprietor. Three years later the commissioner C. O. Naftel adopted Hamilton's vocabulary and applied it backwards, writing that the class had arisen within a few years of abolition.