One late cemetery cannot tell you who founded Egypt

A recent genetics paper concluded that the ancient Egyptians were of Levantine origin. The DNA behind it came from a single locality in northern Egypt, dating to more than two thousand years after Egyptian civilisation was founded, in a district that had been absorbing arrivals from the Levant for over a millennium by that point. Some came as artisans and makers of valued goods whom Egyptian rulers invited in and settled. The Hyksos invaded out of the Levant in the seventeenth century BCE and governed much of the north for more than a hundred years, adding the same ancestry to that same corner of the country. Christopher Ehret answers the paper with a comparison. Take DNA from a South Boston graveyard filled in the 1890s and the sample will report that Americans are of Irish descent, and that the men who founded the United States a century before that were Irish too. The method fails identically in both cases. A late and heavily settled edge of a country is made to speak for a founding population it never held.

Jovenel Moise spent the evening of 6 July 2021 at his house in Pelerin 5 above Port-au-Prince, watching a Copa America semifinal with his wife and two of their children. He had barely left the residence for a week and was frightened for his life. He came off the telephone at about one in the morning. Shooting started nearby half an hour later. At 1:34 he called an officer of his security detail asking for backup, then the chief of police, then the commander of the presidential guard. At 1:46 he telephoned a friend and shouted that he needed help. Outside were at least twenty-one former Colombian soldiers, a justice ministry official dismissed days before, three Haitian police officers and two Haitian Americans, one of them a former informant for the American drug agency. They passed the checkpoints by announcing a DEA operation over a loudspeaker in English and Creole. Officers reached the house at about 2:20 and found the president dead, shot twelve times.

The website Marronnage in Saint-Domingue transcribes advertisements for enslaved people who had run, together with the lists jails kept of those recaptured. Every document appears twice, as a photograph of the original page and as a searchable transcription. By 2020 the project had taken in material from newspapers in Guadeloupe, Guyane, Jamaica, Louisiana, Lower Canada and South Carolina, and was renaming itself Marronnage in the Atlantic World. Those additions carried the advertisements to 15,638 and the jail lists to 6,846. The figure the site gives for people identified, 22,638, cannot be right. An advertisement usually named one person and occasionally a few, while a jail list was generally longer and sometimes very much longer, so the count of individuals recorded has to be considerably higher. Jail lists appear to be peculiar to the French colonies, which is why historians have rarely been able to compare who escaped with who was caught. Saint-Domingue still supplies most of the material.

States answer their emigrants in three ways. Italy, France, Croatia and Portugal grant full membership, which means citizens abroad vote in national elections and elect their own members of parliament. Mexico grants a limited set of rights. Haiti, as of 2016, granted no membership at all, so a Haitian who lives permanently outside the country holds no citizenship rights in it. The demand usually comes from diaspora organisations and their leaders, who argue that recognition would increase what they already put into the homeland economy through hometown associations, business investment and lobbying. Parliaments then decide what form of membership to grant and what constitutional change it requires. The Haitian case is the hard one because the flow of money runs one way in large volume while the flow of rights does not run at all.