Four scholars sat down in May 2015, a century after the marines landed, and talked through what the occupation of Haiti was for and what it left behind. Dupuy traces the setting to the civil war between property-owning factions after independence and to the French indemnity that Boyer accepted for recognition. Renda locates the invasion in a shift of American method, from the discredited colonial wars of the 1890s to the Roosevelt corollary and dollar diplomacy, with National City Bank pressing Wilson to act. The lasting damage they identify is institutional: power centralised in Port-au-Prince, a national army built for the first time able to reach the whole country, and after 1934 a client relationship that needed no troops. Gains are conceded, notably in education and the middle class it produced. The exchange closes on deforestation and the deaths that follow heavy rain.