A future president represents Haiti at Brussels in 1910

Long before he took office, Stenio Vincent served as a Haitian delegate to the international exposition at Brussels and published a survey of the republic with a Belgian publisher, covering its history, resources, climate, agriculture, customs, ethnography, religion and current politics. St. Hubert treats the book and the posting as the origin of a strategy. Born at Gonaives in 1874, with a law degree in 1892 and a post at the Haitian legation in Paris under Hyppolite by 1896, Vincent came to see international expositions as instruments of national argument, taking the example of Brazil as a model. Elected two decades later, he would send more delegations to world's fairs than any Haitian head of state since Salomon, participating in three during the nineteen thirties. St. Hubert reads that early posting as the seed of a lifelong strategy.

Joseph argues that the occupation left a mark on the national psyche that Haitian thought has kept alive, and that the writing produced during it did lasting damage. Travel narratives, novels, memoirs and plays by American writers and artists between 1915 and 1934 repeated the ideas of Haiti's strangeness, tragedy and vast darkness, and presented the Black republic as a headless figure, an object of experimentation and of the foreign gaze. He cites J. Michael Dash's judgement that the American literary imagination of Haiti and its revolutionary history was both misguided and misrepresented, and amounted to a restatement of long-standing stereotypes. Joseph places this within a nineteenth-century American discourse about the Black republic that spread across the Atlantic world, and compares it explicitly to the way Europe invented exotic images of the Middle East, invoking Said's account of Orientalism.

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.

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.