Fatton says the outside world, not Haitian voters, chose Martelly

Fatton uses the presidential election as the demonstration case for his argument that Haiti has become a trusteeship of what calls itself the international community. Elections are financed by foreign powers, supervised and certified by international organisations, and their sponsors veto senators and presidents they find unacceptable, so Haitians may vote without their votes determining who governs. On this contest he cites disclosures by Pierre-Louis Opont, who directed the electoral council that year, and by Ricardo Seitenfus, to the effect that the presidential ballot was altered and that Michel Martelly was chosen. Fatton places the episode inside a longer collapse: the centralised state left by the occupation was hollowed out by three decades of privatisation and liberalisation, its functions taken over by international agencies and non-governmental organisations, a condition made visible by the response to the 2010 earthquake.

Pottery excavated at sites in Puerto Rico and the islands beside it comes in two styles of the same date, and archaeologists have argued for thirty years about what that means. Irving Rouse and others treated the makers of the Huecoid wares as part of the same cultural stock as their neighbours, holding that a difference in decoration is not a difference in people. Luis Chanlatte Baik argued the opposite, that the pottery and the carved stone ornaments of these sites are distinct enough to mark a tradition with its own origin. The dispute went nowhere for a long time, because the evidence was thin and each side could read the same sherds either way. Excavation with controlled stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating has since settled part of it, mostly by establishing which deposits are genuinely contemporary. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show a limit of their discipline. Ethnic and social boundaries in the ancient Caribbean have to be inferred from what people threw away, and objects move between communities more easily than identities do.

In 2007 the Dominican electoral board created a separate civil register for foreigners, known as the Book of Foreigners or the pink registers. A child born in a Dominican hospital to parents who cannot show legal status is given a pink birth certificate and entered in that book. It is a document, and it is not citizenship: people registered in it cannot vote. In the same year the board issued a circular, also called Resolution 12, instructing registry officers to stop issuing identity papers to children of foreign parents whose births had been recorded irregularly. Adults who needed their own birth certificates to enrol at a university found them refused. Whether a father had used a ficha, the identity card handed out by a sugar mill, to register a birth years earlier became the mark that flagged a family. Thousands of people born in the country were left stateless while officials audited their papers.

The debt began with loans taken in the 1960s and 1970s for projects that never paid, and compounded when governments borrowed again to service what they already owed. Export prices fell, terms of trade worsened, and states lost the revenue to run themselves. Africa's total debt went from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion by 1997, and interest on unpaid arrears took a growing share of national output that would otherwise have gone to schools and clinics. Western aid averaging 12 billion dollars a year through the 1990s was a stopgap, and it gave the donors an unprecedented voice in the internal policy of sovereign countries. The money came with conditions attached: liberalise, privatise, cut state spending on health and education. The campaign to cancel the debt was the newest in a line of public causes that began with the movement to abolish the slave trade, and like the missionary appeals of the nineteenth century it treated the continent as a condition to be corrected.