Admiral Killick blows up his own flagship at Gonaives

Antenor Firmin had the north and Nord Alexis had the army. In May 1902 Admiral Hammerton Killick took the whole Haitian navy up to Cap-Haitien along with several thousand Remington rifles and a million rounds drawn from the arsenal. Nord marched on Port-au-Prince, the provisional junta admitted him and refused Firmin, and by June the two sides were fighting. Nord won everything, chased Killick's landing party off the beach, and let his soldiers wreck Firmin's house at the Cap, burning the best private library in the country along with a manuscript history of Haiti that had taken twenty years to write. On 2 September Killick seized a German steamer running weapons north. Berlin sent the gunboat Panther, which found La Crete-a-Pierrot anchored at Gonaives on the sixth. Killick put on his uniform, ordered every man ashore except his surgeon, wrapped himself in the flag and touched a cigar to the powder train. Panther shelled the burning wreck anyway. The Church refused him rites because he had killed himself, and the Kaiser wired his compliments to the gunboat.

The immigrant receiving station on Ellis Island opened in 1892. Through it over the next thirty years came close to four million Italian Catholics, half a million Greeks of the Orthodox church, half a million Hungarian Catholics, close to a million and a half Polish Catholics, over two million Jews out of Russian ruled Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, half a million Slovaks and millions of other Slavs from Byelorussia, Ruthenia, Russia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro. Of the 123 million people recorded in the census of 1930, one in ten had been born abroad and another twenty per cent had at least one foreign born parent. Almost a third of Chicago's 2.7 million residents in the 1920s were foreign born. New Yorkers spoke about thirty seven languages and only one in six attended a Protestant church. Many did not stay. Nearly a third of the Poles, Slovaks and Croatians went home again, and more than half the Greeks.

Africa as a single thing was a European idea before it was an African one. Travel writing, painting and political argument produced the notion, and the partition of the 1880s and 1890s gave it lines on a map, administrations and borders that are still in force. Africans were forming their own view of Europe at the same time and answering on their own terms. From the early twentieth century they took over the invention, building new political realities and a sharper sense of who governed them and how Europe saw them. Contact with European political vocabulary produced African nations and African nationalism, and the words were turned against the powers that had supplied them. Liberalism, socialism, Christian doctrine and Islam were all customised until they worked as weapons. Pan Africanism began off the continent. Conquest had fired the imagination of black people in the Americas, and at the first Pan African congress in 1900 only a handful of the delegates were African at all.

At the start of the twentieth century Haiti had 594 public schools, a figure that had shrunk to 465 by 1913. The private system moved the same way, from 82 schools in 1905 to 53 ten years later. The numbers meant little in practice, because the state of politics made it impossible to allocate money to schooling at all. By the time the American occupation began the public system was near total ruin, the literacy rate for the country stood well below ten percent, and in the countryside almost everyone was illiterate. A 1931 survey of rural schools found rooms with hardly a bench, possibly no blackboard, certainly no maps, and a teacher who was illiterate and could not perform the four arithmetical operations. The census of 1950 put illiteracy at around ninety percent among Haitians over fifteen, ninety three percent in rural districts, and ninety seven to ninety eight percent in some of them.