An article argues that aid fails when it ignores how people live

In July 1951 the Revue de la Societe Haitienne d'Histoire carried an article by Catts Pressoir on the effect of American aid on Haitians. Magloire had signed a Point Four agreement with Washington the year before, and technicians were arriving to reorganise soil conservation, cattle, drainage and public health. Pressoir's argument was that these programmes kept failing for a reason nobody inside them wanted to hear. They were built around what the planners knew and they took no account of the customs by which Haitian country people actually ran their households. A scheme that contradicts the habits of the family it is meant to help gets abandoned as soon as the technician leaves. The point sat inside a longer Haitian argument, running through Jean Price-Mars, that the educated class had been trained to see the peasantry as an obstacle. Pressoir turned that argument on a foreign agency with a budget and a timetable.

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.