Price-Mars argues that trade schools would make a middle class

In October 1912 Jean Price-Mars published a study of technical education in Haïti Littéraire et Scientifique, three months after his article on primary schooling. This case was economic. Vocational and technical training would produce the artisans, mechanics, agronomists and clerks a country needs, and that stratum would be the backbone of a stable middle class. Haiti had a professional elite trained in law, medicine and letters, most of it facing towards Paris, and a peasant majority working the land with tools and methods little changed since the colony. Between the two there was very little. The reform Price-Mars proposed would have built a class with a material stake in Haiti rather than a cultural stake in France. Nothing came of it. The argument returned two decades later in his ethnological writing, where the target moved from the curriculum to the contempt in which the educated held the people they proposed to educate.

Colonial economies contracted during the war. Trade fell, export prices dropped, governments fixed prices and wages, and the cost of imports climbed. Add requisitioning, forced labour, compulsory crop quotas and conscription, and millions of Africans came out of the war poorer than they went in. The war was also the last high point of raw force in colonial rule. From the 1920s the soldiers went back to barracks and market pressure did more of the work than machine guns. Africans who had watched Europeans killing one another in large numbers kept that knowledge. The earliest political associations and protest identities date from these years. The South African Native National Congress, which was founded in 1912 and became the African National Congress, petitioned King George the Fifth for African representation at Versailles and invoked self determination. In Egypt the British detained the nationalist Sa'ad Zaghlul, and the Wafd movement answered with violent protest across the whole territory in 1919. Similar movements stirred in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya.

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.

At three in the morning on 7 August 1912 an explosion shook Port-au-Prince and a column of fire went up from the National Palace. The Italian powder Antoine Simon had left in the basement finally caught, and with it a million rounds of ammunition and other explosives stored there by a run of presidents who preferred their munitions underfoot to out of reach. The floor of President Cincinnatus Leconte's bedroom dropped into the fire. His daughter and son-in-law got out of a window before the building came down. The dead included his grandson and three hundred men of the presidential guard. Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, who had no affection for Haitian politicians, wrote to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 that Leconte's had probably been the best administration Haiti had seen in many years, and that the bank once reckoned ninety percent of customs duties were actually reaching the treasury. Leconte had told him officeholders were threatening his life over exactly that.