The Syrian and Lebanese colony reaches fifteen thousand people

Syrians and Lebanese began arriving in Haiti by the thousand from the 1880s. By 1905 the colony numbered between ten and fifteen thousand people, concentrated in retail trade and travelling the whole country to sell. Their commercial reach cut directly into the interests of the Haitian import and export houses and into some foreign firms as well. From 1900 a violent press and legislative campaign was aimed at the Levantines. They were described as people without culture, without manners and without name, and they were kept out of the social and marriage circles of the established light-skinned bourgeoisie for decades. The stereotypes attached to them outlived the campaign. Their commercial position kept growing. By 1972 the Syrian and Lebanese fraction held the monopoly of the trade in textiles, footwear and clothing, and several of its members had bound themselves to the Duvalier regime closely enough to be counted as macoutes and to hold privileges in smuggling.

On 29 January 1904 Robert Stein, a translator at the United States Geological Survey in Washington and a former Arctic explorer, wrote privately to the novelist Thomas Nelson Page. He set out a plan to remove the nine million black citizens of the United States to Nigeria. Britain would rename the colony Hopeland, crown a Tuskegee graduate as emperor with a gold throne and a cabinet of ministers, and keep every actual power with an English resident, the arrangement already used in the feudatory states of India. Men of mixed descent would supervise the fields and white engineers would supervise them. County by county it would be made illegal for black residents to own property, trade or take work, their land bought at full value and an indemnity paid, so that nobody had to be forced aboard a ship. Stein wrote that the scheme could not be published and asked Page to show it to British diplomats in the city. He had held the idea for fifteen years. Page's papers record no reply.

African objections to colonial rule in the early twentieth century travelled through channels that were not political in form. Carving is one. By the 1930s African artists were producing work that mocked Europeans and the administration they ran, and taking supposedly European styles into African hands was itself a claim about who owned the form. Newspapers are another. The earliest African papers appeared in South Africa in the 1900s, an African press followed in West Africa, and by the years between the wars those papers were the main forum for anti colonial argument. Literacy limited who could read them directly, and villages worked around that by gathering while one person who could read went through the paper aloud. The educated men who wrote for these papers understood how the colonial economy was arranged and resented their exclusion from it. Before the early 1940s few of them asked for independence. They asked for a place inside the system. Colonial schooling had produced its own critics, and the war produced the rest.

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.