Douglass dedicates Haiti's pavilion on an independence day

Frederick Douglass, appointed by President Florvil Hyppolite as Haiti's commissioner to the World's Columbian Exposition, spoke at the dedication of the Haitian pavilion on the anniversary of independence. He told his audience he would speak of the country's character, history and importance, of its struggle from slavery to freedom and statehood, of its relations with the United States and its probable destiny, and of what its example might mean for people of African descent elsewhere. He praised the modest size of the building, saying the government had wisely chosen not to strain its resources. St. Hubert notes that the pavilion was the first foreign building completed at the fair, and that its central hall carried the arms of the republic with three dates, the discovery in 1492, independence in 1804 and the present anniversary.

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 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.

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.