A newspaper cover prints a map and sends its readers up a mountain

For the September 1936 number of La Voix des Femmes, Jeanne Perez chose a map for the cover, and the direction it pointed was north. The issue took readers on the trip many Haitians make once: a hundred and twenty miles from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien, the old capital, then several miles south to the village of Milot, then up the Bonnet a l'Eveque, a mountain of three thousand feet, to the fortress called the Citadelle Laferriere. Henry Christophe built it after independence against a French return that never came, and it is among the largest fortresses in the Americas. A feminist monthly was turning itself into a route. The league had been arguing since 1935 that women belonged inside the revolutionary story of the country. Printing a map and walking the readership up to Christophe's walls was a way of saying that the inheritance was theirs to hand out, and that they had decided who was going.

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.

American oil operations in the Arabian peninsula expanded steadily from 1935, finding new fields, building refineries and laying pipelines from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Revenue on that scale reached the governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq and gave them something no ruler in the region had held before, which was money enough to develop their own resources, raise living standards and lend to Arab states that had no oil. The same oil was a large source of income for the foreign companies and a matter of importance to the economies of western Europe, so protecting it became part of western politics in the Near East. Zeine lists oil production alongside the founding of Israel, the arrival of the United States and the Soviet Union in the region, and the Egyptian revolution of 1952 as the five things that shaped everything afterwards.

In 1937, two years after the border treaty was signed, Haitians living on the Dominican side of the frontier were killed in large numbers. Jean Price Mars called it an abominable drama, a sinister episode and a terrible butchery, and read it as a challenge and a provocation to war. The official Dominican account described painful incidents among Haitian marauders who had been looting settlers. What puzzled Price Mars most was how readily the Haitian government accepted a settlement with the Trujillo administration, and he reported a conversation with a Dominican public figure suggesting that eminent Haitians had connived in it. The killing became a fixed point in Haitian popular memory and, for many Dominicans as well, a symbol of barbarism. It also fitted a policy. Trujillo was planting agricultural colonies along the border to make the zone Dominican, while Dominican migration law went on permitting Haitian labour in the sugar industry.