The first women's league was embalmed and praised and set aside

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale was founded in Port-au-Prince in 1935 and was the first organised women's movement in Haiti. The legal historian Mirlande Manigat gives the standard later judgement on it. More radical women's movements came afterward, and they left the pioneer organisation somewhere between reverence and dismissal, honoured for opening the road and faulted for refusing to walk it to the end. Grace Sanders Johnson found the same doubleness in her interviews, most of them taken shortly before and shortly after the earthquake of January 2010. The earthquake ended the argument for many of the people conducting it, since leaders of the Haitian women's movement died in the collapse. Gina Athena Ulysse then called for new stories about Haiti on the ground that the old ones had stopped working, having reduced a country to resilience, poverty, pity and the supernatural. Haitian women organising in the twenty-first century face what the founders of 1935 faced: a wealth gap, a state that barely registers them, foreign intervention, predatory markets, sexual violence, and schools and clinics they cannot reach.

On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan ordered the Coast Guard to patrol the water between Haiti and Florida and to stop boats carrying people toward the United States. Crews were to interview passengers at sea, return anyone judged ineligible and bring the rest ashore to make an asylum claim. Nobody interviewed on a cutter had access to a lawyer. In the first ten years of the programme, up to the coup that removed Jean Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, more than twenty four thousand Haitians were interviewed at sea and twenty eight were brought to the United States to pursue a claim. After the coup the numbers overwhelmed the cutters, and the administration built a tent city at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where from November 1991 people picked up at sea were sent for screening. It filled with Haitians and Cubans and was hard to empty.

Sub-Saharan African economies grew by an average of 2.4 percent a year between 1980 and 2000, then by 5.7 percent across the decade that followed. Six of the ten fastest growing economies on earth were African: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda. The money came from Chinese, Indian, Gulf, European and North American investment, from the privatisations that structural adjustment demanded, and above all from Chinese appetite for raw materials. Growth on that scale reached very few people. Poverty stayed general, schooling stayed a privilege, healthcare stayed out of reach, and access to capital continued to depend on which family a person was born into, with women worst placed. A middle class is visible in the cities and remains a minority. The proceeds went to roughly the same sort of operators who took them in the nineteenth century, the political, military and commercial adventurers positioned to collect. Selling raw materials at good prices was the engine then as well. What happens to the proceeds is the entire question.

L. Antonio Curet and Joshua Torres challenged the habit of describing every pre-Columbian Caribbean society as a Taino chiefdom. The label began as a convenience for sorting sites and hardened into a statement about how those societies were organised. Once hardened it did work of its own, flattening local difference and hiding the particular sequences by which each island arrived at its own arrangements. The evidence points to a mosaic. Political authority, settlement layout, craft production and ritual varied from island to island and within single islands, and communities a day's sail apart managed power in ways that reduce to no single type. Research since has concentrated on local sequences in place of regional labels. The stakes reach past archaeology. The Spanish arrived carrying categories for reading the people they met, decided what a chief was and who held the office, and governed accordingly. A discipline that inherits those categories is still working with an instrument built for conquest.