Antoine Michel corrects the national history and puts colour back in it

On 10 February 1910 Antoine Michel published a study in L'Impartial responding to Auguste Magloire's history of the republic. Michel set out to correct the record and to insist that colour had shaped national politics from the beginning. The subject was the live wire of Haitian public life. The revolution had been fought by two populations with different histories, the mostly African-born field labourers who had been enslaved until 1793, and the free people of mixed descent who had held property, some of it human, and had often been educated in France. After 1804 the difference persisted as a division between a largely light-skinned commercial and professional class in the towns and a largely dark-skinned peasantry and officer corps. Politicians used it, denied using it, and accused each other of using it. Writing Haitian history meant taking a position on it, and Michel, like every historian of his generation, was arguing about his own decade through the previous century.

Between 1913 and 1931 hundreds of thousands of Haitians crossed to Cuba to cut sugar cane. The wars fought in Cuba from 1895 onward had held the island's own supply of labour low, so when the sugar industry began expanding the planters imported workers, most of them from Haiti. Haiti had people and was running short of ground. Arable land per head was falling by the end of the nineteenth century, and Haitians moved readily when offered higher wages. Living conditions in the Cuban cane districts were hard, and the movement continued anyway. The depression stopped it. Prices for primary products fell, and Cuban population growth had by then rebuilt the domestic labour force to a level at which the Haitians were judged unnecessary. Repatriation began soon after. Those who stayed grew old in Cuba, and by the early 1980s the survivors were elderly men who had arrived as young cutters.

Refusal took many shapes. In the French territories young men crossed borders and waited in hiding until the recruiting sergeants had moved on, the same evasion they used against tax collectors and labour levies. Revolts that looked like protests against conscription carried grievances that had been building since the 1890s. Armed resistance broke out against the British in Nigeria and against the French in Dahomey. In Mozambique the Barwe rose in 1917 against Portuguese rule. The Ottoman empire joined Germany late in 1914 and called for a jihad across the colonial world, which never came. The Sanusiyya, supplied with German and Ottoman money and weapons, beat the Italians in Libya early in 1915 and attacked the British in Egypt. Britain answered by declaring a protectorate over Egypt, crushing nationalist activity there, and taking the sultanate of Darfur in 1916. In Nyasaland in 1915 the preacher John Chilembwe led a short and fierce insurrection, driven in part by the scale of conscription and the number of local men killed fighting the Germans.

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.