Fire, unpaid soldiers, and an old president carried onto a French cruiser

The last months of Nord Alexis went badly. On 5 and 6 July 1908 fire took twelve hundred houses in Port-au-Prince, and four days later the Grand'Rue nearly went with them. Jamaica offered relief supplies and was told that cash would suit better, since government salaries were four months in arrears. In October the president's wife died. He was nearly blind by then and could no longer get onto a horse. On 15 November he watched the Sunday parade from the palace balcony, lectured his officers on loyalty, and then dismissed General Antoine Simon, who had governed the South from Les Cayes for eighteen years. Simon was past seventy. He marched on the capital with peasant troops carrying spears and machetes and reached Leogane on 30 November. On the night of 1 December the last regiments in Port-au-Prince changed sides and the cabinet fled to the French legation. Nord Alexis was still washing when they came to tell him to go. He was walked to the wharf through a howling crowd that cut his coat open and took thirty thousand dollars in gold from his baggage.

In 1906 Benito Sylvain founded L'Oeuvre du Relevement Social des Noirs, placed under the joint protection of the rulers of Haiti and Ethiopia. Sylvain was Haitian, had served Menelik II as an aide, and had attended the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900. The choice of patrons was the whole argument in miniature. In 1906 there were two independent black states with recognised sovereigns anywhere on earth: Haiti, which had taken its freedom from France in 1804, and Ethiopia, which had destroyed an Italian army at Adwa in 1896. Everything else inhabited by black people belonged to somebody. Sylvain's programme was moderate by later standards, aimed at ending colour prejudice and at getting European colonists and African populations to cooperate. The organisation matters less for its programme than for the map it drew. Pan-Africanism in its first decade needed a sponsor with a flag, and the list of possible sponsors had two names on it.

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.

The world depression of the 1930s cut the prices paid for African export crops, and the farmers who grew them for European buyers drew the obvious conclusion about the system they had been recruited into. Across the continent people formed self help associations with economic, religious and ideological purposes. Craftsmen who refused wage employment set up small workshops of their own. Any single one of these bodies was a nuisance to a district officer and nothing more. Taken together they amounted to a withdrawal of consent from colonial rule. What frightened the administrations was the prospect that peasants would stop selling into the market altogether, which would end the export earnings and the tax revenue in one stroke. So the colonial state went into the business it had claimed to leave to merchants. Marketing boards were created to fix the price paid to the grower and to handle exports. Agricultural departments began instructing farmers on technique. Rule by administration expanded, and the machinery it built was inherited later by nationalist governments.