Four hundred and sixty workers pass through the Foyer in a year

Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau wrote the League's report at the end of 1943 and put a number into it. The Foyer Ouvrier was still being built up and had already been visited by more than 460 workers. She described it as a continuous creation, something that adapted to whatever was asked of it and that produced collaboration and understanding between the classes. The number is the part to hold. The Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale drew its members from the professional and propertied families of Port-au-Prince, and there were fewer of them than that. In a single year the Foyer had pulled in more working women than the organisation itself contained. Nine years of speeches about cross-class solidarity had not managed it. A room with sewing lessons, language classes and an open afternoon managed it in months. Sylvain-Bouchereau had trained as a social worker, and the report reads like a woman who has just discovered which of her instruments works.

Portugal and Belgium ran smaller economies than Britain or France, had fewer options, and held on hardest. For Antonio Salazar's government in Lisbon the colonies absorbed surplus Portuguese population, in the way Fascist Italy had imagined using Eritrea and Ethiopia, and supplied markets and raw materials on the nineteenth century pattern. Portugal exported its own authoritarian system wholesale to Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, where opposition was not permitted and reform was not discussed. The Belgian Congo boomed during and after the war on copper, rubber, gold and tin sold to the Allied war effort, and on uranium that went into the atomic bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of that money reached an emerging Congolese middle class. Most of its purpose was Belgium's own recovery. Lisbon feared that any reform in its African territories would open the door to British and French interests. The powers with the least room to manoeuvre eventually left their colonies with the most violence.

The Import-Export Bank of the United States put seven million dollars into SHADA. The money cleared land, paid farmers to work it, and hired administrators to run crop development, production and export. More than ninety thousand Haitians and Americans were employed on the programme. It went wrong from the beginning, and the reason was that the agricultural ambition had been drawn up without much attention to the ground it was to be carried out on. Cultivation takes years that a wartime shortage does not allow. A drought ran through 1943 and 1944. The cryptostegia vine failed to take root in areas the plan depended on. A fire went through one of the SHADA sites. What seven million dollars bought was a demonstration that Philippine agriculture does not transfer to Caribbean soil on demand, and a wide stretch of Haitian countryside stripped of what had been growing on it, which stayed stripped after the programme closed.

SHADA removed peasants from their land by force. Houses were pulled down and fruit trees decades old were cut at the base. By 1943 the company had cleared 47,177 acres. At its greatest extent it held over 100,000 hectares of Haitian ground, which is close to the reach of the plantation system the revolution had destroyed nearly a hundred and forty years earlier. Rubber now stood where cane had stood. The land was worked for export under foreign direction, the people on it drew wages for labouring on fields they had owned, and the logic was the one their ancestors had fought a thirteen year war to break. What had changed was the empire giving the orders and the crop it wanted. Depletion ran through the soil first and then through the people living on it, since a family stripped of its trees and its plot has nothing left to draw down except itself.