Portugal held on longest because it was the poorest colonial power

Europe in 1945 was exhausted and no longer the centre of anything, squeezed between the United States and the Soviet Union after four centuries of preeminence. That made African colonies more valuable in strictly economic terms. Britain leaned on its African possessions harder than it ever had, opening fresh areas to trade, investment and production. Eastern and central Africa became important sources of raw materials for a country short of everything, and those materials sat outside the dollar zone, so Britain could rebuild without depending wholly on American credit. A pattern follows. Portugal, the weakest of the colonial economies, kept its empire until the 1970s precisely because it could not manage without the commercial crutch. Britain, the strongest by the 1950s, gave up political administration soonest, because its economic recovery and its influence let it keep the substance while shedding the cost. In Lisbon economic control required political control. In London and Paris it did not. The two visions belonged to different centuries.

On 11 January 1946 Elie Lescot was forced out of the presidency by a military coup in which Paul Magloire took the leading part. His removal closed the period, running from the start of the United States occupation in 1915, in which the light skinned elite governed Haiti without serious challenge. Several grievances arrived at once. Peasants had lost land to wartime agricultural schemes. Black intellectuals had not forgiven the campaign against Vodou carried out with the Catholic church. The dealings of the Lescot family were widely known. And a war fought against fascism made a president who ruled by decree hard to defend. Dumarsais Estime, a black politician associated with noirisme, was elected to a six year term and took office in August, the first black head of state since Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915. A new constitution was promulgated. The argument Jean Price-Mars had put in a book in 1928, that Haiti should recognise itself as an African country, now held the government.

On 29 June 1950 the United States played England at Belo Horizonte in the World Cup. England had some of the best players in the world and the American side were part timers. The only goal of the match was a diving header by Joe Gaetjens, born in Port-au-Prince, who had moved to New York in 1947 and who turned out for the Americans under a rule admitting men who had declared an intention to become citizens. It is still the most famous upset the tournament has produced. Gaetjens went home to Haiti afterwards and ran a dry cleaning business. In July 1964 the Tonton Macoutes took him away and he was never seen again. His brothers had joined an exile movement against Francois Duvalier. No charge was laid and no body was recovered. The man who scored the goal Americans still talk about was killed by the secret police of the country he was born in.

A farmer at Ulster Spring in Trelawney Parish made brown sugar and drove it to the Brown's Town market in Jamaica in his own mule drawn dray, along with yams, bananas and breadfruit. Local women bought his wet sugar by the tin and sold it on by the pound, clearing ten to sixteen shillings a tin. They took the sugar on credit, dug and weighed it out through the day, and paid him at the close in proportion to what they had sold. Whatever was left went into the market storeroom at twopence a tin and was sold the following market day, when he collected the rest of his money. The price he received was fixed at the moment of sale and did not move with the next week's supply, so the retailer alone carried the risk of a fall. Demand for the sugar dropped when mangoes were plentiful. The arrangement worked for sugar because sugar keeps, which yams and breadfruit do not.