Estime's election puts the black middle class in the Palais National

On 16 August 1946 the National Assembly elected Dumarsais Estime president of Haiti. Since the American occupation began in 1915 the office had gone to men drawn from the mulatto elite, the small, light skinned, French speaking group that held the commerce, the professions and the state offices of Port-au-Prince. Estime came from the black middle class, a layer of teachers, lawyers, doctors and civil servants with education and no access to that circle. His election was the political arrival of noirisme, the argument that a country whose population is overwhelmingly of African descent should be governed by men of African descent, and should treat its own language and its own religion as national possessions. In office Estime filled the ministries with black professionals and worked to loosen the elite's hold on appointments and contracts. The change was real and it was narrow. One set of educated men replaced another at the top of a state that most Haitians still had no part in.

The Arab League was founded on 22 March 1945, less than two months before the war in Europe ended. It confirmed the independence and sovereignty of its member states while laying the basis for a federation in which they could strengthen political, economic and cultural ties without interfering in one another's form of government. Its immediate precursor was Anthony Eden's statement at the Mansion House on 29 May 1941 promising British support for any scheme of Arab unity that won general approval. Independence came in a rush around the same date. French and British troops left Syria on 17 April 1946 and Lebanon on 31 December of that year, and Transjordan became independent on 22 March 1946, with Abd Allah proclaimed king two months later. Two world wars and a quarter century of dealings with Europe had made one thing plain, which was that Arab nationalism could no longer be ignored.

African soldiers fought a long way from home. Troops raised in the French and British territories were in Italy from 1943 to 1945, and British commanders used African regiments heavily in Burma, the campaign that got called the forgotten war. By 1945 more than three hundred and seventy thousand Africans were serving in British forces alone. Many came out of it with a sharper sense of how the colonial system worked and where it sat in the world. Some professional soldiers were demobilised and settled quietly back into their villages. Others became organisers, agitators and party men in the years that followed. What the veterans brought back was firsthand. They had lived alongside Europeans of every class, had killed Europeans, and had watched European officers panic and retreat and fail. The claim that Europeans were a superior order of men did not survive that. Men who had been sent to defend empires that refused them citizenship came home knowing the thing could be broken, and knowing from four years of drill how to organise the men who would break it.

Dupuy closes his defence of Louverture's project with a comparison across a century and a half. France incorporated Martinique and Guadeloupe as overseas departments with full citizenship and elected legislative assemblies, ninety-eight years after abolishing slavery in those colonies. That is approximately the arrangement Louverture had sought in 1801, a self-governing territory inside the French polity whose inhabitants were citizens, with slavery and racial ranking dismantled but the economic link to France retained. Dupuy's point is that the proposal failed for reasons of its moment rather than of its logic. In 1802 slavery and white supremacy were indispensable to France, to its merchants and to its colonial planters, and were beyond Bonaparte's capacity to give up. Combined with mulatto hostility and with the Black nationalist demand for outright separation, that made Louverture's vision unworkable from the start.