The constituent assembly recognises equal rights for Haitian women

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and its allies spent years pressing the case that Haitian women should hold the same political and civil rights as men, and obtained that recognition from the constituent assembly of 1950. In a speech to the assembly on 15 November 1950, Dantes Bellegarde told the chamber that what was wanted was to bring into the direction and management of public affairs an element that had stayed sound, and that by politics he meant education, health, work, hygiene, housing, and help for the poor and the disabled. He then made the argument that carried. Haitians had won their independence in conditions unique in the history of nations, abolished slavery by their own strength with nobody's help, and forced men of every race to recognise them as equals in rights and dignity. Haitians who now denied women their claims, he said, had placed themselves exactly where the colonists stood who kept black people in servitude on grounds of inferiority.

In September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, no European government imagined leaving Africa. There had been trouble. Political movements were forming that pointed toward later nationalism, the countryside protested, workers in the towns organised, Islamic and Christian movements rejected the assumptions colonial rule rested on, and African voices were getting louder. None of it threatened the structure, and no colonial power had given serious thought to retreat. Twenty years later Britain and France had begun programmes of withdrawal that could not be reversed, Belgium was about to lose the Congo, and only Portugal and the settler regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa were digging in, at a cost paid out over the following decades. Europe left Africa in roughly the span of time it had taken to seize it. The change came from two directions, from what European governments needed at home and abroad, and from African movements altering the facts on the ground. Grievances accumulated through the Depression and the war hardened after 1945 into parties.

From the 1950s the classical account of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution came under attack from several directions at once. One of them was the Atlantic thesis of Jacques Godechot and Robert Palmer, which held that the French Revolution was a part of a single great revolutionary movement running through the whole western world. That movement included the American Revolution, the Latin American revolutions, revolts in almost every European country of the late eighteenth century, and the revolution in Haiti. France was the most intense case and not a different species. Wallerstein notes that the Atlanticists kept most of the assumptions they were attacking, describing the movement as liberal, bourgeois and democratic. Albert Soboul rejected the thesis furiously, because grouping France with the west of the eighteenth century pulled it away from Russia in the twentieth. Haiti enters that argument as evidence, and the argument was never really about Haiti.

Bananas had been grown in Dominica for centuries in the gardens of ordinary cultivators, alongside the ground provisions people actually ate. They counted for little in the export ledger until the 1940s. Then the growth was fast. By 1953 bananas made up forty five per cent of the value of everything the island sold abroad, and they held that place for decades. Dominicans had watched crops rise and fall before. Coffee, sugar cane, cocoa, limes and vanilla had each in turn dominated the accounts, and every shift rearranged who worked for whom. What was new lay in the source. The crop that took over the export economy came out of the peasant garden, which meant that buyers had to reach into thousands of small holdings to collect it and to organise the collecting. Dominica's unity, in this reading, lies in the succession of single crops that tied it to markets elsewhere.