Well protected by fortifications of their famed cuadrilátero, Paraguayan soldiers surely exclaimed in wonder as they looked toward Brazilian lines on June 24, 1867. There, rising slowly in a hazy wintry sky, was a captive balloon held by two strong ascension ropes. An observer with a good spyglass could have seen in the basket two men who gazed intently at the Paraguayan positions. The aeronauts were James Allen of Rhode Island and Sergeant Major Roberto Adolfo Chodasiewicz, a Polish military engineer and cartographer. This first ascension by the smaller of two balloons proved that the brothers James and Ezra Allen, with the aid of Chodasiewicz, could succeed where a Frenchman, P. L. D. Doyen, had failed on December 14, 1866.

Two dominant features of agricultural history in the English West Indies are the formation of the plantation system and the importation of large numbers of servile labourers from diverse parts of the world—Africa, Europe and Asia. In Barbados and the Leeward Islands, the backbone of early English colonisation of the New World, large plantations developed within the first decade of settlement. The effective colonisation of these islands, St. Christopher (St. Kitts) in 1624, Barbados 1627, Nevis 1628, Montserrat and Antigua 1632, was possible because of the early emergence of large plantations which were clearly designed for large scale production, and the distribution of commodities upon the world market; they were instrumental in forging an effective and profitable agrarian culture out of the unstable frontier environment of the seventeenth century Caribbean. These plantations, therefore, preceded the emergence of the sugar industry and the general use of African slave labour; they developed during the formative years when the production of tobacco, cotton and indigo dominated land use, and utilised predominatly European indentured labour. The structure of land distribution and the nature of land tenure Systems in the pre-sugar era illustrate this. Most planters who accelerated the pace of economic growth in the late 1640's and early 1650's by the production of sugar and black slave labour, already owned substantial plantations stocked with large numbers of indentured servants.

In the second half of 1793, slavery was abolished in the French colony of Saint Domingue or present-day Haiti. This was one of the most radical events of the French Revolution and one of the great moments in Caribbean history. Saint Domingue became the first land in the New World to outlaw slavery and to offer full rights to non-whites, yet there has been much confusion over how and when abolition occurred. Historians of the French Revolution have generally ignored abolition altogether, apparently as irrelevant to the “real” revolution, while Caribbeanists have frequently been guilty of publishing incorrect or at least incomplete versions. Even specialists in Haitian history have failed to distinguish between the various abolition proclamations which were issued between June 21 and October 31, 1793. It is the purpose of this paper to give a correct chronology to abolition and to show that it was due primarily to the efforts of one man, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, aided somewhat reluctantly by Etienne Polverel.

The pursuit of economic and political progress engaged many of the Salvadoran elite during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The intellectuals were no less energetic in the chase. Travelers to El Salvador at the turn of the century commented favorably on the progress they perceived. Marie Robinson Wright, who visited the country in 1893, wrote euphorically of “modern improvement,” “progress,” and “development.” “Salvador flourishes,” she rhapsodized, “a glorious example of good discipline and government.” Percy F. Martin wrote in 1911 a long, sober account of his visit. He concluded, “The present condition of her civilization, of her arts and her commerce is eminently encouraging.” He also characterized the Salvadorans as “the most developed and most intellectual” of the Central Americans. These assessments inferred that the progress El Salvador demonstrated drew on North Atlantic models, and to the degree the Salvadorans adopted those models they were judged favorably by foreigners.

We Americans cannot complain: Our civilization is European. We have been copying from Europe from the French Revolution on, even to importing the Cafe chantant. So far, we have lacked the application of chemistry to our social order, the end-of-the century use of explosives. Now, even this is on the way here; at least the seed of the tree is among us. It would seem that the corner bootblack, and the sweeper down the street have not yet realized that all the capital of Pereira's is really their capital. The hungry of Europe bring us the contagion of rage stored up for centuries, to our blessed lands, where only the man who doesn't want to, fails to put in his pot the chicken which the goodhearted Henri IV2 wished for the soup pots of his subjects.