A corporal fires twice at a fleeing man and kills a boy on an errand

On the morning of 26 August 1915, a month after the Marines came ashore, Caroline Dagille sent Ludowick Jeudi, aged seventeen or nineteen, out on errands. Her instructions took him toward the corner of Rue du Pont and Rue Oswald Durand in Cap-Haïtien. On that same morning a man named Louie Joseph was being held at the American regional headquarters in the railway station on Rue du Pont, accused of stealing a cow. When the woman who had accused him arrived to make her statement, Joseph saw her and ran. Corporal Fred Parsons drew his pistol and fired twice down a busy street. People scattered after the first shot, apart from a few children crouching at the west end of the bridge. Joseph stopped and gave himself up. Ludowick had just turned the corner. He was hit, ran along Rue Oswald Durand and dropped. Dagille found him sitting in a chair against a wall some two hundred yards off, his body cooling to the temperature of the stone behind him. His parents lived in the country and had trusted her with him.

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.

American administrative control of Haiti ran from 28 July 1915 to 15 August 1934. In those nineteen years the occupation rebuilt the Haitian armed forces on an American model and laid 1,200 miles of all weather highway, much of it built by peasants conscripted under an old corvee law that the Americans revived. The same period produced Charlemagne Peralte, who led the Caco war against the occupation, was shot dead in 1919 and was then photographed tied upright to a door so that the picture could be circulated as proof. The photograph became the standing image of Haitian resistance and did the opposite of what the occupation intended. The Americans who governed treated Vodou as a police problem and never grasped how much of Haitian life ran through it. Haitians called the withdrawal of August 1934 the second independence. The phrase set the terms of every argument that followed about what exactly the country had to take back.

United States marines landed at Port-au-Prince in 1915 and stayed until 1934. German and French capitalists were eliminated from the country in favour of American interests defined by the Monroe doctrine. In the plains American companies monopolised sugar, fruit and sisal for export, and large landed property consolidated around them. Peasants were dispossessed of land they occupied or rented. The occupiers restored compulsory labour for building roads and railways. The consequences ran in four directions. Smallholding peasantry broke up. The labour freed by that process became seasonal hands on the plantations. Migrants left for Cuba and the Dominican Republic, where cheap Haitian labour served capital in both countries. Others gathered in the towns, above all in Port-au-Prince, which from then on concentrated economic activity. Inside the state the senior posts filled with light-skinned men at the same moment as the economic position of the same families strengthened. The colour question came back into political life through that door.