James lands in London and is in a Lancashire mill town by May

James arrived in London and moved in May to the Lancashire cotton town of Nelson to stay with the family of the Trinidadian professional cricketer Learie Constantine. He was there officially to help Constantine write his autobiography, but it was Constantine who arranged for a local Nelson printing firm to publish James's own book on the Trinidad labour leader Cipriani. Hogsbjerg stresses that this was the manuscript James had carried from Trinidad and that once it was sent back to the West Indies he considered himself free for his real work, which he expected to be a second novel. The play displaced the novel instead. James later put it that fiction writing drained out of him and was replaced by politics, a shift driven by his campaigning for West Indian self-government.

In August 1931 the public works department, the health service and the wrecked Service Technique were handed back to Haitian control. Haiti could pass its own laws again without submitting them to the American legation, and the national bank could pay government warrants without an American signature. Colonel Little, back at the head of the marine brigade and genuinely liked in Port au Prince, ended martial law and ordered that the flagpole at the barracks flying the American colours be cut down until it stood lower than the flagpole at the palace. Two things remained. A treaty had to replace the one imposed in 1915, and a constitution had to replace that of 1918. The constitution of 1932 was presented as liberal, kept Louis Borno's amendments of 1927, concentrated more power in the palace, and quietly preserved the clause allowing foreigners to own land. The assembly then rejected the treaty. The way around it was an executive agreement between the two presidents, signed on 7 August 1933.

Herbert Macauley founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party and put anticolonial argument on a territorial footing, addressing Nigeria as a country rather than a set of localities. In 1936 younger men who found Macauley too cautious broke away and formed the Nigerian Youth Movement. Their demand was complete autonomy within the British empire, with a united Nigerian nation to follow. They drew wide support for a few years. In 1941 the movement tore itself apart over rivalry between Yoruba and Igbo members, each side convinced the other meant to dominate whatever state emerged. The same problem showed elsewhere. In Uganda much of the protest was aimed at the dominant position of the Ganda rather than at the British, and the standing quarrel over Buganda and its kabaka promised trouble for any future national settlement. What these movements shared was youth. Educated, mobile, often both, young Africans were forging the new political identities, and they carried their fathers' quarrels into them.

Rafael Trujillo ordered a mass killing of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937. After the Second World War he took an interest in sugar production and found that he needed workers. In 1952 his government signed a treaty with the Haitian government covering the seasonal movement of cane cutters across the border. Two renewals followed, one in 1959 and one in 1966. From 1971 the arrangement ran instead through contracts between the Dominican state sugar council and the government in Port-au-Prince, and these lasted until Jean-Claude Duvalier fell in 1986. They became a way for successive Haitian governments to make money. The Haitian side was paid a sum for setting up recruitment centres, and part of the migrants' wages was held back, officially to be handed over at the end of the season, in practice sent home and pocketed by the ruling circle. Conditions in the cane were documented from 1979 onward as slavery in all but name.