A voice from 1802 is used to galvanise a hall in 1942

The reviewer's account of the central scene is about sound. Sanité Bélair, full of enthusiasm and hatred of slavery, raises her voice to the soldiers, and the voice carries the accents of victory and freedom. The audience at the Rex Theatre was receiving an instruction delivered in the second person. Perez built the play so that the revolutionary promise sounded newly lit, and she built it out of young women's voices, so the past being summoned was one in which women gave the orders. That past went into the ears of a Port-au-Prince audience in August 1942 at a volume no printed history could reach. Haitian schoolbooks name Sanité Bélair and move on to the generals. On this stage she commanded, and the people hearing her were being asked to answer. Perez called it care for the nation, which is a plain way of describing what she was doing to the room.

Fighting on African soil was confined to a narrow strip of Mediterranean coast. Italian forces crossed from Libya into Egypt in the late summer of 1940 and were driven back into Libya by a small British force. The arrival of the German Afrika Korps changed the position completely, and for a time the drive toward the Suez Canal looked impossible to stop. Egyptian nationalists grew restless and feeling against the British hardened. Then the British held the Germans at El Alamein in October 1942, and the canal was safe for the empire for the time being. The threat that lasted was the Egyptian one, which outlived Rommel by more than a decade. British and Australian troops pushed the Germans west toward Tunisia. At the far end of the Mediterranean an American army came ashore in Morocco and Algeria, which put an end to the ambiguous standing of the Vichy administration there. The two forces closed on Tunisia from both sides and put the last Axis soldiers off the continent in May 1943.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk died on 10 November 1938. The generation that had won the war of liberation and carried through the first reforms had by then reached the end of its creative period, working from goals set in the Young Turk era: a national Turkish state in a modern political form. Karpat's judgement is that they started with a society whose institutions were rooted in Islam, under bad conditions inside and out, and permanently undermined the belief that social arrangements, customs and authority were fixed. Ataturk is described as a soldier ruler rather than a dictator, a man who refused the title and kept insisting on national sovereignty, who ordered, punished and rewarded in the manner of someone used to being obeyed. He was an orphan raised in a village and then in Salonica. His coffin was placed in 1953 in a monumental tomb above Ankara.

The Société Haïtienne-Américaine de Développement Agricole was set up to grow rubber for a wartime market, and its method was to take farmland out of food. Crews cleared standing crops and cut down trees that bore fruit so that rubber could be planted in their place. Peasant families were moved off the plots they worked. The returns came in slowly and small. What the project delivered instead was displacement on a mass scale and the loss of the fruit-bearing stock that households had eaten from for generations. Fruit trees take years to bear. A family that loses one loses a decade of food, not a season of it. The rubber that replaced them failed to take hold, so the cleared ground gave nothing back to anybody. The ecological damage and the human damage were the same damage counted twice, and both were charged to people who had not asked for the scheme and could not refuse it.