Africans who watched Europeans kill each other draw conclusions

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.

Fifty United States marines came ashore at Port-au-Prince on 17 December 1914, walked to the National Bank of Haiti, took 500,000 dollars in gold from its reserves and carried it out to a warship. The gold was delivered to the National City Bank in New York. The Americans described this as safekeeping. Joseph Davilmar Theodore was president. His anti-American speeches had irritated Washington, and Washington was already uneasy about the speed with which Haitian governments were falling and about German commercial weight in the country in the first months of the European war. The removal did what a robbery would have done. It emptied the reserve standing behind the currency, it left Theodore visibly unable to protect the national bank of his own country, and it told every Haitian who read a newspaper that the United States treated Haitian sovereignty as conditional and Haitian assets as available. Seven months later the marines came back and stayed for nineteen years.

On 12 August 1915 American Marines stood inside the Haitian National Assembly with fixed bayonets until the members confirmed Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave as president. Dartiguenave, born on 6 April 1863 into a wealthy light skinned family, had been president of the Senate when Sam was killed. The Americans refused Rosalvo Bobo, the man most likely to win, and settled on Dartiguenave as someone who would cooperate. He was the first light skinned southerner to hold the office since 1879, and he governed as a proxy for American officials who ran the money, the armed forces and foreign policy. He signed a treaty giving the occupation legal form and placing Haitian finances under American control. The Haitian army was dissolved and replaced by a national guard armed, trained and commanded by the United States. That guard administered the corvée, which required peasants to work without pay on the national roads, a compulsory labour system imposed on the grandchildren of people who had fought a revolution to end compulsory labour.

Caperton had 400 men ashore in a city holding at least 1,500 of Rosalvo Bobo's Cacos, the remnants of the Reforme faction and what was left of the army. The Comite Revolutionnaire belonged to Bobo and was pressing the National Assembly to elect him. When the deputies asked whether they might proceed to an election, the admiral put them off. On 2 August he reported to Washington that the Cacos were professional soldiers under chiefs who sold their services to whoever offered most, that all Haitians feared them, that they effectively decided who governed, and that Congress had been about to elect Bobo out of fear until he stopped it. The Comite went on as though nothing had changed. It jailed a senator named Joseph Dessources for criticising it, and the Americans ordered him released. It took over the telegraph offices and filled the wires with messages for Bobo, and Caperton took charge of communications. It began drawing government money, and Caperton moved every gourde into a blocked account.