Leconte's body came out of the palace in pieces

The explosion that destroyed the National Palace in August 1912 has an ordinary explanation. Antoine Simon had left decaying Italian gunpowder in the basement and it went off. Henry Furniss, the American minister in Port-au-Prince, sent Washington a confidential note that complicates it. When President Cincinnatus Leconte was recovered from the wreckage, the head, the arms and the legs had been separated from the trunk. That condition is consistent with a killing followed by the firing of the magazines, which is why the accident has never entirely settled. Suspicion fell first on the Zamor brothers and the Caco fighters behind them, who wanted the palace and had it within two years. One further coincidence sits in the file. Leconte died on the exact anniversary of the day he had finally driven Anténor Firmin out of the country. Offered a choice of culprits, opinion in the capital settled on the Syrian merchants, who served as the standing scapegoats of every Haitian crisis.

Guilbaud kept pushing on education under Tancrède Auguste and got very little in the towns and nothing in the countryside. Sir Harry Johnston, the British explorer and colonial analyst, had visited Haiti in 1910 and set out why. The Budget général, handsomely printed, carried a section for the Department of Public Instruction laid out in a detail he compared to Switzerland or Germany. Most of that structure existed on paper. The money voted for it reached the pockets of officials or never left the treasury at all. Johnston doubted that any rural school existed, though five hundred were provided for, and thought that where one did it functioned as a small income for someone unfit to teach. About two and a half million of Haiti's three million people could neither read nor write. This is the shape the postcolonial state kept taking: European architecture on the page, and underneath it an arrangement for moving public money among the governing few.

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.