Pyke puts the concession hunters on the record

On 30 April 1912 Joseph Pyke wrote to the Foreign Office in London about who was coming ashore in Haiti. Steamer after steamer, he reported, carried specialists whose work was to spy out the land with a view to exploiting its resources. The letter matters for what it fixes about timing. Three years before the American occupation began, a diplomat with no stake in the outcome was already treating the survey of Haitian assets as the central fact of the country's situation, ahead of the risings in the North and the state of the treasury. The men Pyke watched disembark were not looking for a government to negotiate with. They were looking for what could be valued, and the valuation of Haiti was well advanced before a single Marine came ashore. Correspondence of this kind is often the only surviving record of arrivals that no Haitian office wrote down.

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.

Soon after taking office in 1913, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan asked John Allen of the Banque Nationale to come and explain Haiti to him. Bryan said he was very interested in the place and asked who the people were, then stopped and asked where it was. Two hours later, as Allen was leaving, Bryan shook his head over the discovery that there were Black people who spoke French. American policy towards Haiti for the next two years was built on that foundation. The Roosevelt and Taft administrations had held that small republics could be steadied by customs control imposed from Washington. Woodrow Wilson added instruction in democracy, remarking of Mexico that he meant to teach the Latin Americans how to elect good men. Bryan's information about Haiti came almost entirely from Roger Farnham, a vivid talker who ran the National City Bank's interests there. The occupation was assembled out of ignorance, condescension and a banker's balance sheet, which hold together far better than malice.