Market women walk further every day than the delegates drove

Critics asked whether the league's members were serious or whether the whole thing was a pastime for educated women in the capital. Madeleine Sylvain answered by pointing at movement. A doubter might not follow the politics, she suggested, but he could count the miles, and the miles showed that women wanted to be near one another badly enough to pay for it. A second reading sits inside the same figure. The delegates had come by road, over bad surfaces, and had arrived tired. Haitian market women covered comparable distances on foot or by donkey every day of their working lives, carrying the produce that fed the towns and the trade that kept the economy upright, and nobody had ever treated their travel as a political fact. The league's journeys were an echo of theirs. The women who moved the country's food had no organisation, no newspaper and no delegates.

The sharp increase in Jewish immigration into Palestine between 1933 and 1936 hardened Arab opposition to the Balfour Declaration and produced strikes, bloodshed and then open rebellion that lasted from 1936 to 1939. Serious disturbances broke out on 19 April 1936, and on 7 August a royal commission was appointed to establish the underlying causes and to determine whether either Arabs or Jews had legitimate grievances under the terms of the mandate. The commissioners reported on 22 June 1937 that partition was the only method they could propose for dealing with the root of the trouble, on the principle that half a loaf beats none. The Woodhead Commission sent out in 1938 found no workable partition scheme, and the White Paper of 1939 was a further British attempt at a settlement. The mandate ended on 15 May 1948 and the war followed at once.

Jose Francisco Pena Gomez was born in May 1937 near the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Five months later Trujillo ordered the slaughter of dark skinned residents of that zone, an operation called Operacion Perejil and known more commonly as El Corte, the harvest. The dead were estimated in the tens of thousands, and Pena Gomez's parents were among them. He was raised by an adoptive Dominican family. The circumstances of his birth gave his political opponents their whole line of attack, and for decades he was accused of being Haitian; in the mid 1970s a journalist pressed him to answer the charge in an interview, and the recording and notes were lost. He ran for the presidency and never won it. After his final defeat he said racism was well entrenched in Dominican society, that a bloodbath would have followed had he been elected, and that Dominican society was not yet ready for a black president. He died on 10 May 1998.

For Africans and people of African descent across the Americas, the Second World War started in 1935. Ethiopia was the only genuinely independent state on the continent, and Mussolini wanted it, partly to build a new Roman empire out of Eritrea and partly to avenge the Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896. Through the early 1930s he argued in Europe that Ethiopia was an anachronism, a savage and unstable place that practised slavery and deserved no recognition. Britain and France quietly agreed. Italy invaded in October 1935 claiming an Ethiopian attack near the Somali border. The technological gap that had not existed in 1896 decided everything: armoured columns, aircraft and the occasional illegal use of poison gas. Addis Ababa fell in early 1936 and Haile Selassie went into exile, telling the League of Nations that Europe would be next. The Patriots kept up a guerrilla war throughout. Ethiopia became the focus of pan-African protest and an inspiration for the Rastafarian movement. Allied troops, including West and Central African units, restored Selassie in 1941.