A hundred garment factories fall to twenty three in thirty years

Through the 1970s and early 1980s Haiti's apparel plants employed between sixty thousand and one hundred thousand people in more than a hundred factories, and only money sent home by Haitians abroad brought in more. Baseballs belonged to the same trade. Until 1987 every ball used in a major league park in the United States had been sewn in Haiti. Then the end of the Duvalier governments, the struggles that followed Aristide's election and a long trade embargo took the industry apart. By 2009 twenty three factories were left, employing twenty five thousand people, about sixty eight per cent of them women. Thirteen belonged to Haitian companies, four to South Koreans, three to American firms and three to Dominican ones. All but one stood in the capital. The exception was CODEVI, owned by Group M, in the free trade zone at Ouanaminthe on the Dominican border.

On a Wednesday afternoon in the autumn of 1979 a man called Jean Baptiste came into the general medical clinic at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Two weeks earlier he had left the wards with tuberculosis confirmed by biopsy and drugs that were known to work against it. He was emaciated, could barely walk, fell to one side when he did, and the left side of his face had dropped. The senior emergency room resident argued that he needed time to heal. A week later he returned unable to walk at all, held up by friends, and was admitted only under threat of disciplinary action. A scan showed several large lesions in his brain, read at the time as pockets of tubercular pus. He died within a fortnight. His physicians concluded that he had come in too late carrying too much disease, which was a reasonable conclusion in 1979. Nothing in the training of anyone on that ward described what had actually killed him.

Sub-Saharan African economies grew by an average of 2.4 percent a year between 1980 and 2000, then by 5.7 percent across the decade that followed. Six of the ten fastest growing economies on earth were African: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda. The money came from Chinese, Indian, Gulf, European and North American investment, from the privatisations that structural adjustment demanded, and above all from Chinese appetite for raw materials. Growth on that scale reached very few people. Poverty stayed general, schooling stayed a privilege, healthcare stayed out of reach, and access to capital continued to depend on which family a person was born into, with women worst placed. A middle class is visible in the cities and remains a minority. The proceeds went to roughly the same sort of operators who took them in the nineteenth century, the political, military and commercial adventurers positioned to collect. Selling raw materials at good prices was the engine then as well. What happens to the proceeds is the entire question.

L. Antonio Curet and Joshua Torres challenged the habit of describing every pre-Columbian Caribbean society as a Taino chiefdom. The label began as a convenience for sorting sites and hardened into a statement about how those societies were organised. Once hardened it did work of its own, flattening local difference and hiding the particular sequences by which each island arrived at its own arrangements. The evidence points to a mosaic. Political authority, settlement layout, craft production and ritual varied from island to island and within single islands, and communities a day's sail apart managed power in ways that reduce to no single type. Research since has concentrated on local sequences in place of regional labels. The stakes reach past archaeology. The Spanish arrived carrying categories for reading the people they met, decided what a chief was and who held the office, and governed accordingly. A discipline that inherits those categories is still working with an instrument built for conquest.