Baseballs are sewn in Port-au-Prince while the land gives out

By 1978 about 250 assembly plants in Port-au-Prince employed some 60,000 people making baseballs, clothing, wicker furniture and electronic parts for North American buyers, and one economist reckoned a third of the capital lived off that work in one way or another. New roads ran from Jacmel to the Cap and west toward Les Cayes. Club Med opened on a beach fifty miles north of the city, where guests ate imported food behind a chain link fence. The country underneath was failing. Plots divided among heirs and then divided again had become too small to feed a family, so people walked to the towns. Coffee exports in 1977 came to 450,000 bags, half what Haiti had shipped in 1910, and after the hurricane of 1979 cultivators began cutting down coffee bushes and mango trees for charcoal. The island that had once supplied Europe with sugar was buying sugar. In 1978 African swine fever crossed into the Dominican Republic, and the pig in the yard was the savings account of a countryside that had no banks.

About fifty thousand Haitians applied for asylum in the United States between 1972 and 1980. Twenty five of them succeeded. The reason was not hidden. At a congressional hearing in 1980 Senator Dennis DeConcini said that a boat refugee from Cuba was automatically treated by the immigration service as a refugee, while a boat refugee from the Haiti of Jean Claude Duvalier was automatically treated as an illegal alien who had come for economic reasons. Admitting that Haitians were fleeing persecution would have meant admitting in public that a government Washington supported was persecuting its people. President Jimmy Carter tried a provisional answer on 20 June 1980 by creating a status called Cuban Haitian entrant, which covered people who had already arrived. The refusals resumed after the election, and between September 1981 and March 1985 not one intercepted Haitian was found to have a valid claim.

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.

For roughly two decades after 1958, archaeologists working in the Caribbean sorted the earliest island material into stages taken from North America and from Old World sequences. The schemes of Gordon Willey, Philip Phillips and Irving Rouse became the standard way to name what came out of the ground, and the islands acquired a Lithic age and an Archaic age on that authority. A classification is an argument about what a society was. Categories designed for stone using hunters on a continent make island people look like a rough opening chapter waiting for something better to arrive. Keegan and Hofman note that the rigid schemes survived long after specialists agreed they had stopped working, and that they survived because so few researchers cared about the oldest periods. The Greater Antilles, Haiti among them, are where the newer evidence keeps landing. This is the machinery that lets a timeline of the Caribbean begin in 1492 and call everything before it prehistory.