Knox tells Haiti that the canal requires quiet neighbours

On 3 April 1912 the armoured cruiser Washington brought Philander C. Knox to Port-au-Prince. He was the first American secretary of state to set foot in Haiti since William Seward, and he carried a message he had already delivered in Cuba, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Santo Domingo. The Panama Canal was about to open. The Caribbean republics were to settle down. Knox told President Cincinnatus Leconte that the success of the American work of cutting a highway for world commerce depended on the peace of the countries around it, and that a state torn by internal quarrel or in default on its foreign obligations was in no position to share the benefits the canal would bring. Read that again for what it takes for granted. The nine countries on Knox's itinerary existed here as approaches to a waterway, and their politics were to be judged by how smoothly they moved American cargo.

Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche was born in Haiti, sent to France as a boy to study, and qualified as an engineer. He married a Frenchwoman, Juliette, and they had two daughters. Engineering work in Europe was closed to a Black man whatever his qualifications, so the family booked passage home to Haiti, where he expected to be hired for what he could do. They boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg. He was the wealthiest Black passenger on the ship. When it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on the night of 14 April 1912, Laroche put Juliette and the girls into a lifeboat. They reached New York. He did not. For most of the twentieth century the Titanic was retold without him, in books, exhibitions and films with room for the millionaires and the steerage Irish and none for a Haitian engineer travelling first class with his family. The remembrance industry wanted its dead wealthy and white. Laroche was one of those two things.

The European war arrived while most colonial administrations in Africa were still consolidating what they had seized. German Togo and Cameroon were invaded late in 1914, and the fighting in Cameroon ran into 1916. South African forces took German South West Africa and stayed there for more than seventy years. In eastern Africa the German commander von Lettow-Vorbeck kept a column moving through Mozambique, Nyasaland and northeastern Rhodesia and gave himself up only when he heard of the armistice in November 1918. Most of the soldiers on both sides were African, led by small numbers of European officers. Between 750,000 and one million Africans were pressed into service as porters, and roughly one in five of them died, mostly of disease. Armies burned crops and stores as they moved. France sent 150,000 West Africans to the Western Front and thirty thousand of them were killed. Conscription acquired a name among Africans, the blood tax. French operations against resistance to recruitment completed the conquest of West African districts that had held out since the 1880s.

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.