German troops land in Port-au-Prince to guard German property

German sailors were put ashore in Port-au-Prince in 1911 to protect German nationals and their property during a Haitian revolution. At the same time foreign diplomats were telling the American State Department that German merchants in Haiti were financing several of the revolutionary movements themselves. The two facts fit together. German houses in Haiti bought the bonds of insurgent generals at a heavy discount and redeemed them at face value from the treasury when the generals won, which turned revolution into a traded security. When the fighting reached the streets where the merchants kept their warehouses, Berlin sent a warship. The Haitian government could refuse neither the money nor the landing party. This was the pattern that made Washington nervous. A German naval presence in a country lying across the sea approach to the Panama Canal was, for the United States, an argument for getting there first, and in July 1915 it did.

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.

Japan defeated Russia in 1905. It was the first time in the modern era that a non European power had beaten a European empire in a full scale war, and the news travelled fast through every territory then under European rule. The practical consequences were in Asia. The consequences that mattered elsewhere were about what people believed was possible. Colonial administration rested on the claim that European supremacy was a fact of nature and not an outcome of gunnery, industry and organisation, and Tsushima made that claim harder to state with a straight face. Nicholls places the Japanese victory among the events that fed the growth of black consciousness in the years before the First World War, in Haiti and in the wider black world. Haiti had made the same argument in 1804 by destroying Napoleon's army, and had been punished for a century for making it. In 1905 the argument was made again by somebody else, and this time Europe had to concede the point in public.

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.