Thirty seven and unmarried, and asked about it at every wedding

Jeanne Sylvain was thirty seven years old and single while the weddings went on around her. In the class she came from that counted as a condition requiring urgent attention, which is why she could hear a run of marriages as an emergency when other people heard only good news. Every invitation that reached the Sylvain house and every reception she attended brought the question about her own status, put to her by relatives, by friends and by people who hardly knew her. Her sister Yvonne, single at thirty six, said plainly that Jeanne's situation was a choice, since there had been no shortage of men wanting to court her. Two educated sisters in one house had each declined the arrangement their society treated as the only completed form of a woman's life. Their money and their family name made the refusal survivable. Neither made it comfortable, and the questions did not stop.

French territories south of the Sahara had been decisive for Charles de Gaulle during the war. They supplied soldiers, and they supplied the land and air routes across the continent that made a Free French war effort possible at all. African nationalists knew what that was worth. At Brazzaville in 1944 de Gaulle was obliged to promise political reform once the fighting ended, a package of concessions that African military and economic contributions had forced and that also acknowledged how much France would need its colonies to rebuild. The promise was aimed at keeping the empire steady and intact. Meanwhile inflation, broken trade routes and low export prices piled onto hardship left over from the 1930s. African workers had discovered their own leverage and were using strikes and new trade unions to real effect, above all in the mining zones. The British answered with film, radio, newspapers and pamphlets, which required presenting the colonial state as good and its enemies as evil. An empire that had demanded obedience now had to ask, and a request can be refused.

C. L. R. James published the first edition of The Black Jacobins in 1938, writing in London for the Trotskyist press and organising for African independence. The book takes the revolt that began in Saint-Domingue in 1791 and treats it as a revolution of the first rank, with Toussaint Louverture as a political thinker and the enslaved of the northern plain as the people who decided the outcome. Before it, the standard European account handled Haiti as a colonial disaster with a body count attached. After it, the years from 1791 to 1804 could be set beside 1789 and 1917 and discussed in the same terms. The timing was deliberate. James was writing for readers who would soon be demanding an end to empire in Africa and the Caribbean, and he handed them a case in which enslaved people had beaten France, Spain and Britain in turn and founded a state. The argument outlived its first edition by decades.

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.