Five provisional governments, then Kebreau picks Duvalier

The book lists the sequence: Pierre-Louis from December to February, Sylvain from February to April, a collegial government in April and May, Fignole in May and June, and Kebreau from June to September, amid violence among the supporters of four significant candidates out of thirteen. It argues the military was decisive and that the outcome was not predetermined. General Kebreau's emergence in May as the strongman and a Duvalier supporter made possible the defeat of Dejoie's backers inside the army, the exile of Fignole and Duvalier's victory. The three real candidates are read as class representatives: Dejoie for the mixed race bourgeoisie, the church hierarchy and Washington, Duvalier for the black middle class, black officers and the black landowning bourgeoisie, and Fignole for the urban and lumpen proletariat, whose influence stopped at the edge of Port-au-Prince. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against Trouillot's reading of the 1957 campaign as a set of purely personal undertakings without political discourse or programme, the book argues the candidates nonetheless represented antagonistic classes and class factions, with class content expressed in the language of colour or popular justice.

The world of 1945 was a different place. Indian nationalist advances suggested an empire in retreat and encouraged movements on both sides of the Sahara. Japan, during the war, had beaten European powers across Southeast Asia and taken Singapore from the British with startling ease, showing that a non-European state could humble them, though Japanese conduct toward occupied populations destroyed any standing it had as a liberator. The United States mattered most. Franklin Roosevelt disliked European empire and pressed for a decolonisation timetable. After his death that priority slid down the American agenda as the Cold War took over. Washington's concern became keeping poor countries out of communist hands, and European empire could be recast as protection for peoples thought vulnerable to it. The United States went on preaching against colonialism while supplying military aid to Portugal's fascist government fighting Marxist guerrillas in Angola and Mozambique. The Soviet Union declared itself anti-colonial by nature and from the 1960s offered African movements diplomatic backing and weapons.

A revised edition of James's history appeared with footnotes, a new appendix and six fresh paragraphs opening the chapter on the war of independence, containing what one critic calls his most concentrated meditation on Toussaint's tragedy. Hogsbjerg links the revision to James's sense that decolonisation had changed what the story meant, since writing about independence around 1960 was a different matter from writing about it in 1936. The reading James settled on is that Toussaint's error came from the very qualities that made him, and that his failure was a failure of enlightenment rather than of darkness. Dessalines could see the situation clearly and simply because the ties binding him to French civilisation were the slenderest. James then helped a fellow Trinidadian adapt the history into a new play with the same title.

Mrs. N. farmed with her husband on about four acres near Brown's Town in Jamaica and had five children, four of them still at home. She decided the local market paid too little and began travelling to Kingston. Each journey took planning. She borrowed or saved capital, guessed at demand, bought eggs, avocados, soursop, pumpkins and fowls in her own district, loaded them on a donkey and met a truck on the road on Sunday afternoon. Her daughter walked the donkey home and took charge of the baby. The truck cost twelve shillings out and six back. The market opened at midnight and charged a gate fee and a handcart fee of one shilling sixpence each. More than a pound sterling went on transport and fees before she made a single sale, and about three pounds more had gone on the produce itself. She chose light goods with a high unit price because fares rose with bulk. Her capital was often borrowed from market butchers at a shilling per pound for three days. Losses on a few successive trips could end her business.