A bull is sacrificed carrying Jimmy Carter's photograph

The regime read the American papers and adjusted. A working group under the defence minister Aurelien Jeanty was told to deal with what the president called the intolerable attitudes of the so called independent press. Two Port-au-Prince papers were closed, one before its first issue reached the street. In the provinces, out of sight of foreign reporters, militiamen went back to beating schoolchildren and extorting money. Luc Neree, the Baptist pastor whose letter to Jimmy Carter had begun the trouble a year earlier, was set upon by macoutes on the interior minister's orders and left for dead. He came out of the coma the next day and was sent home to recover slowly, while his son supplied daily bulletins on his condition to foreign contacts, having worked out that publicity was the only protection available. Then the government reached for older methods. Zacharie Delva, the boko who ran the Gonaives region, opened 1978 by presiding over a ceremony at which a bull carrying a photograph of Jimmy Carter was killed. Simone Duvalier had concluded that Gede had turned his back on her family.

Between 1979 and 1981 as many as seventy thousand Haitians entered Florida by boat. Many of the vessels were small open sailing craft, the kanot used for fishing. Richman notes that during the 1970s a higher share of the Caribbean population emigrated than that of any other region of the world. The traffic stopped almost at once when Washington acted. Coast Guard cutters were stationed in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti to intercept the boats and burn them, to weigh claims for political asylum and to send back everyone found ineligible. Virtually every claim was rejected. Arrivals fell to a dribble through 1982 and did not resume with any regularity for nine years. The people who had landed found work almost nowhere except migratory farm labour, settling in Belle Glade, Immokalee and Fort Pierce to cut sugar cane and pack vegetables, and moving each summer with labour contractors to the farms of the middle Atlantic coast.

By the 1970s most of newly independent Africa was in economic crisis. Populations had grown fast since the 1950s while states still lived on the sale of one or two commodities, so when agricultural export prices fell through the 1970s and stayed low through the 1980s there was nothing to fall back on. Copper dropped and took Zaire and Zambia with it. The oil price rises of the early and middle 1970s wrecked importers and let road and rail systems rot. Governments made their own contribution. Convinced that development meant repeating European industrialisation, and inclined to treat peasants as an embarrassment, they starved agriculture. Ghana built the Volta dam and let cocoa production collapse, which helped end Nkrumah. Tanzania moved whole villages at gunpoint under Nyerere. Factories needed foreign machines and foreign loans, the debts grew, and servicing them meant exporting still more crops and minerals. Independence had changed the flag above an arrangement built in the nineteenth century.

Irving Rouse spent four decades building the framework that Caribbean archaeology still argues with. On his model the Boca Chica pottery style began in the southern Dominican Republic and reached Puerto Rico with Chican potters who set up colonies on the southern coast, and local groups there developed the Capa and Esperanza styles under that influence. Influence in this account runs one way, from a source to a periphery, and the resulting style zones become the boundaries of indigenous provinces on the map. Later work reads the same pottery differently. The styles look like the product of traffic in both directions across the Mona Passage, where people, goods and marriages moved between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico for centuries. The dispute is about method as much as about pots. A decorated vessel records what a potter had seen and whose work she admired, and turning that into a claim about which people lived where, and who counted as whom, is a longer leap than the evidence supports.