Haiti's commissioner had refused to help take the Mole

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.

The Jamaica International Exhibition opened in 1891 under Governor Henry Blake. Kingston was hung with wreaths and triumphal arches, fireworks were set off, and visitors came in from the countryside and from abroad over the fourteen weeks it ran. Haiti had attempted the same thing ten years before. The Haitian Exhibition of 1881, staged under Lysius Salomon, failed to raise the foreign interest in Haitian agriculture that its organisers wanted. Jamaica hoped for more and got less than it spent, since the show ended as a financial loss. The colony counted tourism and foreign investment as the real return. Royal Mail steamers arriving weekly were joined by United Fruit ships bringing visitors from Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. Government money then went into hotels, and the Myrtle Bank, the Constant Spring and the Queen's became the places tourists stayed. Both islands were being drawn into an American commercial system, from opposite ends of it.

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.

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.