Income of 270 dollars a head in the richest colony's successor

By 1994 income per head in Haiti had fallen to 270 dollars a year. The Heinls set that figure against 1789, when the French colony of Saint-Domingue produced roughly three quarters of the sugar sold in the world and was the most profitable possession any European power held. The modern country buys its sugar abroad along with its fuel. Adjusted for inflation, Haitian exports in 1995 were worth less than the colony's exports in 1788. Across the same two centuries the population grew to eight million while the ground that will grow anything shrank, because the topsoil has washed off the hillsides into the sea. The authors call the whole arc a regression measured in centuries, and read it as the compound result of foreign greed and deliberate isolation imposed on the first state founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery. Chronic hunger is the ordinary condition of the country that once paid for Bordeaux and Nantes.

In 1998 the National Coalition for Haitian Rights helped secure passage of a bill allowing forty thousand people who had fled the Haitian military coup of 1991 to apply for permanent residence in the United States. The organisation had been founded in New York in 1982 as the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees by Michael Hooper, a white American immigration lawyer, and had been a plaintiff in the court cases seeking constitutional protection for Haitians in detention. By 1998 it ran offices in New York and Port-au-Prince, held clinics to help immigrants naturalise, and joined coalitions with other migrant groups to move legislation. In Haiti it pressed for the prosecution of people who had committed abuses under the military government, which made it enough of a presence in Haitian politics that in 1999 the head of its Port-au-Prince office survived an assassination attempt.

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.

Reniel Rodriguez Ramos worked through the stone tools from La Hueca and Punta Candelero to test whether the Huecoid and the Saladoid were one people or two. The test rests on a property of stone working. Techniques for making lithic tools change slowly and pass from one worker to another by direct instruction, which makes them the most conservative part of Caribbean material culture and a steadier marker of identity than pottery, where styles travel between communities that share nothing else. If the two groups belonged to a single culture, their stone assemblages should look alike. They did not. His results showed production methods holding steady across long stretches of time and differing between the two groups, which supports a picture of the early Ceramic Age Caribbean as several distinct cultures living at the same time in the same islands. Arguments about who the first islanders were have run on pottery for most of a century. This moved them onto harder ground.