A historian puts a number on the disputed participation

Seymour Drescher published a study of Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic slave trade in 2001 and attached a figure to the question. It is unlikely, he wrote, that more than a fraction of one percent of the twelve million Africans enslaved and relayed across the ocean were bought or sold by Jewish merchants even once. At no point along the chain of that trade were Jews numerous, wealthy or powerful enough to affect its structure or its flow, or to lessen the suffering of the people carried in it. The number matters because a very large claim had been made in the opposite direction and had spread widely. One percent of twelve million would be a hundred and twenty thousand people, and the estimate is that the real share fell well below even that. Schorsch reaches the same conclusion from a different direction, finding Jewish slave owning and slave trading minimal in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean alike.

Aristide won the presidency again on 26 November 2000 with ninety-two percent of the ballots cast. The opposition had refused to take part. A boycott produces exactly this result, a number that looks like unanimity, on a low turnout, against nobody. His supporters read the vote as the return of the man the poor elected in 1990 and the army removed in 1991. His opponents read it as theatre staged by a government that had already mishandled the legislative elections in May. Foreign donors took the second reading and froze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to a country that could not run itself without it. Aristide began a second term with a mandate on paper, an empty treasury, no army, a police force he had started filling with loyalists, and an opposition that had withdrawn from every institution where it might have been outvoted. That combination was still in place three years later when he was removed for the second time.

By the time Parham finished her fieldwork, an email list known as the Corbett List had been running for eight years and included some of the most influential leaders of the Haitian diaspora. Human rights advocates used it to circulate petitions and to gather support for changes in Haiti. Word of the list travelled along ties that already joined advocacy workers, academics and missionaries, and those ties held it together. She sets it beside a website forum that produced an organisation which folded inside a year. Her conclusion is that online space for a scattered nation serves expression well and organising badly, unless the people in it are already connected somewhere on the ground. About half the respondents in one Haitian forum she studied worked with advocacy organisations, and thirty of forty Haitian community groups she catalogued had an email address, a website, or both.

Famine became the standing image of modern Africa, and by the 1970s many states were importing the staples they had once grown. Sub-Saharan Africa combined the fastest population growth outside the West with the slowest growth in food production. Three explanations get offered. Climate is one, since Sahel rainfall stayed low through the 1970s and 1980s. Pressure on fragile land is another. The third is political, and it does most of the work, because in a great many famines the volume of food does not fall at all. What changes is price, distribution and who holds a claim on a share. War causes famine and famine feeds war. Zimbabwe kept grain reserves through the 1980s and had food security because of them; structural adjustment called reserves a distortion of the market, the government sold them for foreign exchange, and when the rains failed in the 1990s the silos were empty. Mugabe then withheld relief from districts that voted against him.