A former Haitian president concedes African fanaticism in London

Francois Denys Legitime, president of Haiti from 1888 to 1889, addressed the Universal Races Congress in London in 1911. The congress had gathered scholars and public men from four continents to argue against the racial science of the day. Legitime used his turn to acknowledge what he called African fanaticism in Haiti, describing such traits as survivals that a people does not shed easily while it develops. He meant Vodou. He was also speaking the language of his class, which had spent a century trying to persuade Europe that Haiti was civilised by disowning the religion of the Haitian majority. The bargain never paid. Haiti signed a concordat with Rome in 1860 and let the Church run campaigns against Vodou, and foreign writers went on describing the country as a place of cannibals and sorcerers anyway. Twenty-six years before Legitime spoke, Antenor Firmin had faced the same audience and attacked its premises instead of conceding its examples.

Cincinnatus Leconte took the presidency in August 1911 after driving out Antoine Simon. He had been born on 29 September 1854 into the Black landowning class, trained as a lawyer, tied by politics and marriage to the Sam family, and descended from Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general who declared Haitian independence in 1804. Leconte set about the dull work of making the ministries function. He had one year. In August 1912 the National Palace blew up, killing him and three hundred soldiers of the presidential guard. What came next is easiest to read as a list. Tancrède Auguste succeeded him and died on 2 May 1913. Michel Oreste succeeded Auguste and was driven out in January 1914 by Oreste Zamor, who was driven out in October 1914 by Joseph Davilmar Théodore, who was driven out in February 1915 by Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. That is five presidents inside four years. In July 1915 the United States Marines landed, and they stayed for nineteen.

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.