The last loan before the occupation is sold at a thirty eight percent discount

Nineteenth century Haitian governments borrowed abroad in 1825, 1874, 1875 and 1896. The first of those was an indemnity France forced on the country. The rest were floated for purposes that had in common a private benefit to the ruling clique and a heavy cost to the state, since none could be placed except at a steep discount, and they were accompanied by domestic loans on similar terms. The practice continued into the new century. In 1910 a further foreign loan, the last before the American occupation, was floated at a discount of thirty eight percent. Between 1912 and 1914 six domestic loans finished off whatever creditworthiness remained. That record shaped the economic policy of the occupation administration, which put the interests of the American bondholders who held the consolidated debt ahead of everything else. The external debt was halved between 1924 and 1930 and paid off entirely in 1947.

By 1909 France and Germany carried more commercial weight in Haiti than in any other Caribbean country. The clergy were French, French importers at Le Havre took two-thirds of the coffee crop, and every Haitian loan from 1825 to 1896 had come from France. German firms moved two-thirds of Haiti's trade on the Hamburg America Line, controlled the railway, the Port-au-Prince wharf, the ice plant and the electric company, and married into Haitian families to get around the ban on foreigners owning land. German money financed the revolutions as well, buying rebel bonds at ten cents on the dollar and redeeming them in full when the rebellion won. In 1910 a Franco German group offered a new bank and a loan of 65 million francs secured on the customs. The National City Bank of New York and Speyer and Company offered 12.5 million dollars against American control of the same customs. Washington objected furiously to the European plan, and in January 1911 American interests took half of the new Banque Nationale de la Republique d'Haiti.

In January 1906 L'Etoile Africaine ran articles on the Pan-African movement then taking shape. The movement was six years old, dating from the London conference of 1900, and it had almost no institutional existence yet: a handful of meetings, a few journals, letters passing between men in the West Indies, the United States, west Africa and Europe. A paper in Port-au-Prince publishing its arguments was one of the connections that made it a movement at all. Haiti's place in this was peculiar. It was the reference point everyone in the network cited, the proof that black self government existed, and it was at the same time a poor country under mounting American pressure whose own newspapers were reading about the black world elsewhere. The journal's name states the position it took. The link ran both ways, and Haitian intellectuals were consumers of Pan-African thought as well as its favourite example.

The European war arrived while most colonial administrations in Africa were still consolidating what they had seized. German Togo and Cameroon were invaded late in 1914, and the fighting in Cameroon ran into 1916. South African forces took German South West Africa and stayed there for more than seventy years. In eastern Africa the German commander von Lettow-Vorbeck kept a column moving through Mozambique, Nyasaland and northeastern Rhodesia and gave himself up only when he heard of the armistice in November 1918. Most of the soldiers on both sides were African, led by small numbers of European officers. Between 750,000 and one million Africans were pressed into service as porters, and roughly one in five of them died, mostly of disease. Armies burned crops and stores as they moved. France sent 150,000 West Africans to the Western Front and thirty thousand of them were killed. Conscription acquired a name among Africans, the blood tax. French operations against resistance to recruitment completed the conquest of West African districts that had held out since the 1880s.