Two hundred thousand Haitians are living in the Dominican Republic

By 1980 some two hundred thousand Haitians were living in the Dominican Republic, some for a season and some for good. Movement across that border is old and has taken three forms. The first people to go were maroons, escaping slavery on the French side during the colonial period for the Spanish side, where treatment was often better. After independence in 1804 the pattern changed. Haitian occupation of the Spanish part of the island and the invasion attempts that followed emptied the border districts on the eastern side, and Haitians filled the space. The third and largest movement came from sugar. American and other foreign firms built plantations and mills in the Dominican Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century and could not find enough local labour. In the 1950s the two governments signed an agreement that formalised the traffic. Observers compared the cane workers' conditions to slavery, and expected earnings there still beat those on a Haitian farm.

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.

Drought settled over the Sahel from the early 1970s and held, from Mauritania and Mali east to Sudan and Ethiopia. Famine followed, and it fell on countries already fighting civil wars or moving their own farmers by force. By the 1980s agriculture sat at the centre of the crisis. Several states had become net importers of food and depended on aid to buy it. Land grew scarce, farmers pushed into pasture and into ground that made them ill, and herders and cultivators fought over what was left. The young left for the cities, and slums spread around Lagos, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Political sovereignty had arrived without economic sovereignty. Populations watched their governing elites take what there was, welcomed the coups of the 1960s and 1970s, then watched the soldiers fail as well. By the early 1990s governments were accepting structural adjustment from the IMF and the World Bank: shrink the state, free trade and currency, and take instruction on the rest.

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.