Volleys in Port-au-Prince while the centenary bands play

Frederic Marcelin had suggested the centenary be marked by pardoning every Haitian exile. On 1 January 1904, while the ceremonies at Gonaives were still going on, soldiers surrounded a house in Port-au-Prince where about thirty men were meeting and shot General Maxi Momplaisir with his son and his coachman. General Maxime Jacques broke a leg getting away, reached asylum, and gave himself up when the authorities seized his wife; he was shot in bed. The American consul reported that defence lawyers at the trials could not be heard over drumming and that every accused man was condemned. Then came the apparatus: curfews at Jeremie and Jacmel, permits to leave the capital, copies of all telegraph traffic delivered to the palace, letters opened at the post office, and in 1905 three thousand dollars paid to a New York detective agency to watch Haitian exiles abroad. The same president backed two capable ministers and tried to revive rural schooling, in a country with roughly 654,000 children of school age and 30,000 enrolled anywhere. In 1905 he revoked the charter of the national bank, which he called the rogue bank, and carried on with no bank at all.

Japan defeated Russia in 1905. It was the first time in the modern era that a non European power had beaten a European empire in a full scale war, and the news travelled fast through every territory then under European rule. The practical consequences were in Asia. The consequences that mattered elsewhere were about what people believed was possible. Colonial administration rested on the claim that European supremacy was a fact of nature and not an outcome of gunnery, industry and organisation, and Tsushima made that claim harder to state with a straight face. Nicholls places the Japanese victory among the events that fed the growth of black consciousness in the years before the First World War, in Haiti and in the wider black world. Haiti had made the same argument in 1804 by destroying Napoleon's army, and had been punished for a century for making it. In 1905 the argument was made again by somebody else, and this time Europe had to concede the point in public.

The Union of South Africa was created in 1910 as a settlement between British settlers and Afrikaners, and the white population as a whole defended the position that settlement handed it. Between the wars every mainstream white party developed racial segregation further, along with influential lobbies including Anglican missionaries, some arguing that it secured labour and white supremacy, others that it shielded Africans from modern life. Wartime growth pulled thousands of Africans into the cities and the National Party campaigned on white fear. In 1948 it won under D. F. Malan on apartheid, a word meaning separateness. The Population Registration Act of 1950 sorted everyone into white and non-white, the second category subdivided into Coloured, Indian and Bantu, a linguistic term now put to work as a racial one, then subdivided again by tribe. The Group Areas Act fixed where each group could live and broke African unity by design. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 gave African children schools built to teach them their place.

Haiti was much as it had been. The region around it was being rebuilt. The Spanish American War of 1898 confirmed the United States as the ruling power of the Caribbean, and American editors were already calling the sea Mare Nostrum after the Romans. Marines occupied and pacified Cuba twice between 1900 and 1910. Puerto Rico was an American possession, so was the Panama Canal Zone, and Washington was negotiating control of the customs houses of Honduras, Nicaragua and neighbouring Santo Domingo. Two ideas carried the policy. The Roosevelt Corollary held that no European power would be permitted to intervene in the Americas and that the United States would itself end the disorder and theft that invited such intervention. Dollar Diplomacy, stated plainly by Secretary of State Knox in May 1911, made American money the instrument of stability in the small republics near the canal. Haiti was poorer and less settled than any of its neighbours, sat astride the main approach to the canal, and was believed in Washington to be a German target. That combination decided the next twenty years.