Marines carry half a million dollars in gold out of Haiti's bank

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.

The armistice signed at Mudros on 30 October 1918 by the government of Ahmed Izzet Pasha marked the Ottoman defeat in the First World War. Officers and intellectuals had seen the outcome coming since 1917 and had begun to think about what would follow, since a multinational Ottoman state could not be rebuilt and a Turkish national state barely existed as an idea. The Allies had already agreed among themselves how to divide the empire. Allied troops landed at Istanbul on 13 November 1918 and set up a military administration. In the spring of 1919 French forces moved into Ayntab, Marash and Adana, the Italians landed at Antalya and the British at Samsun and the Dardanelles. Sultan Mehmed VI accepted the occupation and turned to persecuting the surviving Union and Progress leaders. An empire that had lasted six centuries was being taken apart by agreement among its conquerors.

The United States Marine Corps landed in Haiti in 1915 and stayed nineteen years. President Wilson appears to have feared growing German influence, with Mole Saint Nicolas sitting opposite Guantanamo. American investment in the country was small at the time. Just before the landing, President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was killed by a crowd and his torn limbs carried through the streets of the capital. It took four years to pacify the country, which required putting down the rising led by Charlemagne Peralte. The Americans then did in Haiti what they had done in Cuba, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic and created a modern constabulary combining army and police under Marine supervision, the Gendarmerie d'Haiti. It became the Forces Armees d'Haiti and from the late 1930s decided how long any sitting president would remain. Elections and plebiscites held up to 1929 were all controlled by the Marines.

Wages fell across Africa through the 1930s, in the mines, on white-owned plantations and in the towns that Africans were moving to in growing numbers. South Africa recorded serious African unemployment for the first time since the industrial boom of the late nineteenth century. Prices fell too, which softened the blow on paper and made little difference in a household. Inflation in several territories hit town workers hardest, and real wages did not rise again until the second half of the 1940s, so the decade of hardship ran on for fifteen years. Poor whites suffered alongside them. Commercial farming had pushed tens of thousands of white families off the land and into the cities, where they competed with Africans for the same work, which is why the colour bar laws exist. Those who stayed on their farms scraped by growing maize for the towns. This population, urban and rural, became the constituency that Afrikaner nationalist politicians set out to win, and the winning of it reshaped South Africa.