Haiti refuses the American demand for a deep-water port

Renda points to the American bid for a deep-water harbour at the Mole Saint-Nicolas as the moment when direct pressure on Haiti became explicit, with an American naval officer pressing the case. She stresses two features of the episode. Haitian diplomats were not yet dealing with an established dominant power, since the structure of American policymaking had not settled into what it later became, and Haiti had never been shut out of diplomatic exchange in the way it later would be. Antenor Firmin, author of the refutation of Gobineau's racial science, was among those who refused the demand. Renda's point is that Haitian statesmen contested white supremacy through their engagement with the international order rather than by withdrawing from it, and that this leverage narrowed sharply over the following decades as American power grew. The scan is damaged here and part of her sentence is lost.

Dahomey had been the dominant power on its stretch of the West African coast since the 1720s. French forces conquered it between 1892 and 1894, and the kingdom stopped existing as a political entity in 1900, when the French removed its last king. A degree of institutional continuity survived through rituals performed at the royal palace in the capital city of Abomey, which became a museum. The defeat also loosened the rules about what could be spoken. The origins of the royal clan had been guarded as a secret held inside the dynasty, and no account of them appears in any European source written before the monarchy was destroyed. Within about a decade of the conquest a French colonial official named Le Herisse published what became the classic version of Dahomian traditional history, taken from a single informant, Agbidinukun, a brother of the last independent king Behanzin who served the French as a district chief. What the palace had kept turned into a printed book.

The immigrant receiving station on Ellis Island opened in 1892. Through it over the next thirty years came close to four million Italian Catholics, half a million Greeks of the Orthodox church, half a million Hungarian Catholics, close to a million and a half Polish Catholics, over two million Jews out of Russian ruled Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, half a million Slovaks and millions of other Slavs from Byelorussia, Ruthenia, Russia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro. Of the 123 million people recorded in the census of 1930, one in ten had been born abroad and another twenty per cent had at least one foreign born parent. Almost a third of Chicago's 2.7 million residents in the 1920s were foreign born. New Yorkers spoke about thirty seven languages and only one in six attended a Protestant church. Many did not stay. Nearly a third of the Poles, Slovaks and Croatians went home again, and more than half the Greeks.

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.