| Summary/Abstract |
Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia existed precariously, between the world wars, on the edges of an international order dominated by Europe. The only independent states at the League of Nations governed by people of African descent,1 each faced an incursion that effectively vitiated its legal sovereignty. Haiti was occupied by the United States from 1915 to 1934. Ethiopia was occupied by Italy from 1936 to 1941. Liberia was placed under financial receivership, formally investigated by the League and threatened with occupation between 1929 and 1936. Peripheral to the international society which sought to extinguish them, they became central to global, and especially pan-African, anticolonialism. Many participants in anticolonial movements across Africa and the Caribbean after 1945 had been deeply affected by a political and theoretical engagement with the interwar experiences of these states. The outcomes of interwar political developments in Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia were widely seen, by both their supporters and detractors, to have major ramifications for the colonised world, especially the African continent and diaspora. It is surprising, then, that comparative studies of these states have been so rare in modern scholarship.
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