An inventory of ruin: shaking bridges, broken mains, posts like shanties

John Laroche became Leconte's minister of public works, and late in 1910 he had written down what he was inheriting. Streets turned to mud in the rain. Roads were broken enough to stop goods moving. Bridges shook, and when they fell the towns lost contact with the countryside. The jails had holes in them. The iron markets were rusting for want of maintenance. The telegraph wire had been up more than fifteen years. Port-au-Prince had broken water mains. The army posts looked like abandoned shacks. Leconte repaired streets and roads, and the first automobiles began working their way around the capital. Telegraph lines were restrung and new ones built, and by July 1912 Furniss could telephone Port-au-Prince from Grand Gosier while touring the back country on horseback. Leconte also moved against Vodou, denouncing it as a crude cult, in a season when the British minister was reporting to London that he had seen a temple with its sacred tree, its stone and its graves half a mile outside the capital.

Antoine Simon's army had gone through the North in February, burning villages and stripping gardens. It withdrew, and on 8 May 1911 revolt broke out again in every district the troops had crossed. The insurgents were Cacos, peasant fighters of the northern mountains who hired themselves to whichever general could pay. This time they chose their targets. They burned the sawmill and the construction camps of the National Railroad, fired into the houses of railway employees, and shouted against James P. McDonald, the American who held the concession. The company had handed its dynamite, powder and blasting caps to government troops, which placed it on one side of the fight. Foreign observers filed the Cacos under banditry. Bandits do not single out the physical plant of a foreign concession from everything else available to burn. The men who lit those camps knew who was laying track across their land and on whose account.

Nikolai Kondratieff described long economic waves in the 1920s. Others had described such cycles before him, and his account of how they work is no longer widely accepted. The name stuck anyway. Wallerstein's version turns on monopoly. Significant profit requires selling well above the cost of production, which requires a quasi monopoly, so any period of real expansion has a few leading products that are relatively monopolised and enormously profitable. Monopolies then destroy themselves, because new producers eventually get past the barriers, competition rises, prices fall and profits fall with them. The expansion phase and the stagnation phase together have usually run fifty to sixty years. Sugar and coffee were leading products of exactly this kind, and the fortunes made in Saint-Domingue before 1791 belong to an upswing, while the collapse of Haitian export prices in the following century belongs to the other half of the cycle.

By the 1920s more than three hundred thousand residents of the United States were of Caribbean derivation, the accumulated result of migration out of the islands after emancipation. They arrived just as the Great Migration was bringing millions of rural African Americans into northern cities, so the two movements met in the same neighbourhoods and pressed the same demand for inclusion in American society. Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887, built the Universal Negro Improvement Association into an organisation that linked struggles for Black equality across the Atlantic. Hubert Harrison, born in the Danish West Indies in 1883, supplied much of the writing that fuelled the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, alongside the Jamaican American poet Claude McKay. In Martinique at the same period Aime Cesaire was formulating negritude as a literary answer to white racism. The redefinition of Black art in the United States came in large part from people born in the islands.