The women soldiers of Dahomey fight their last battle at Cana

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.

The authors locate the root of Haiti's concentrated commercial ownership in the entry of foreign merchants in the late nineteenth century, who typically remained resident aliens to keep the protection of foreign governments while marrying into elite Haitian society to get around the ban on foreign ownership of land. Groups of Syrians and Lebanese began arriving in the 1890s and reached an estimated population of six thousand by 1903, by which time these recent immigrants owned the major trading houses and the transportation and communication systems. The paper quotes the occupation-era Haiti Blue Book claiming that from 1804 to 1915 the agriculture, commerce and industry of the republic were largely in the hands of Germans, French, Syrians, Belgians and English who cared little what became of Haiti so long as they got their share.

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.