Japan beats Russia and colonised people take notice

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.

Dumarsais Estime was born at Verrettes in the Artibonite on 21 April 1900, a black provincial with no family standing, and he was schooled by the Christian Brothers at Saint Marc before moving on to the Lycee Petion in the capital. Mathematics was his subject in the classroom until he crossed President Borno and lost the post and the platform together. The elections of 1930 returned him as a deputy. He rose to preside over the Chamber and then to hold cabinet office under Vincent, remembered by colleagues as silent, surly and tireless. Senator Alphonse Henriquez called him a motor in a pair of trousers. Katherine Dunham, who knew him closely, wrote that his brusqueness covered a timidity underneath, and that his head looked too large for his body in the manner of Benin bronzes and Bambara masks, where the sculptor puts the spirit and intelligence of a man in the head. When he took the presidency in 1946 the Griot generation read it as their own arrival, and Rayford Logan called it the advent of the noir elite.

Cotton growing spread across southern Uganda between the 1900s and the 1920s, and it produced a class of farmers whose grievances turned into politics. Land was held under a system that made chiefs into landlords, many of them absentee, and the tenants who actually raised the crop paid whatever rents those chiefs set. In 1928 the colonial administration capped what a chief could charge. The second complaint was about selling. Marketing arrangements favoured Indian merchants and the handful of large firms standing behind them, and Ugandan growers were kept out of the trade in their own cotton, which was the position African producers also held in Kenya and, with European buyers filling the role, in West Africa. Populist associations with the character of trade unions appeared in the 1930s, pressing for supervision of landlords and a share of the market. Economic complaint of this kind is where much of African nationalism began. The Asian community stayed commercially powerful in Uganda until Idi Amin expelled it in the early 1970s.

In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt announced that the United States held a duty, divinely conferred, to protect and regulate the small states of the Caribbean. The wording did the important work. A duty cannot be declined, and a duty that comes from God cannot be argued with on the merits, so any future landing of American troops in the region could be presented as an obligation discharged instead of a decision taken. Underneath sat the assumption that the countries concerned could not run themselves and that their disorder threatened the prosperity of everyone nearby, including the American investors and creditors whose claims were the usual occasion for sending a warship. Haiti had been independent for a century and was the oldest of these states. It carried the largest debts and had the least stable government, which put it near the top of any list drawn up on Roosevelt's principles. The doctrine was announced in 1904 and applied to Haiti in 1915.