Washington buys the Danish West Indies to guard the canal

In 1917 the United States bought the Danish West Indies, the islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix, and renamed them the Virgin Islands. The purchase was strategic. The Panama Canal had opened in 1914, and Washington wanted no European power holding a harbour on the approaches to it, least of all with a war running in Europe and German submarines at sea. Nicholls files the transaction alongside the occupation of Haiti and the occupation of Nicaragua, because all three belong to one policy. The Caribbean was being converted into an American lake, and the instrument varied with the case: a cheque to a small European state, a treaty extracted from a government the marines had installed, a landing party. Haiti's place in this was geographic. It sat on the sea lane that mattered to the United States at the moment the United States decided that sea lane would answer to nobody else. Anything Haitians did or failed to do in those years was read in Washington through that single consideration.

When the occupation began planning roads into Caco country in 1916, a Haitian cabinet minister showed the Americans the Code Rural. Geffrard's corvée had been sitting in it since 1863: the people of each section were to maintain the highways running through their land, and the police were to enforce it. Smedley Butler was happy to enforce it. From July 1916 gendarmes notified peasants named by the magistrats communaux and the chef seksyon that they could pay a tax or work three days. Nobody had money, so they worked. They were supposed to be fed, housed and entertained with bamboches, which the Americans described as Voodoo dances. Butler drove Dartiguenave out to the work sites in the presidential Ford most weeks so the president could share the rice and peas and explain that this was for Haiti. In 1915 there were three miles of road outside the towns fit for a car. By March 1918 the corvée had built or rebuilt 470 miles at 205 dollars a mile. The route from Port-au-Prince to the Cap opened on 1 January 1918 and took the presidential Ford fourteen hours.

The Prix Goncourt is the most prominent literary award in France. In 1921 it went to Batouala, a novel by Rene Maran set among Africans in French Equatorial Africa. The decision mattered a long way from Paris. Black writers and artists in Haiti and elsewhere read it as evidence that African life could be the subject of serious literature in the language of the colonisers, and interest in Africa among them sharpened afterwards. Haiti at the time was six years into an American military occupation, and its intellectuals were in the middle of a long argument about where the country's culture had come from. The generation that produced Jean Price-Mars and the indigenist movement was reaching for African descent as an answer. A prize handed out in a Paris dining room supplied a piece of that case. Nicholls puts it in a Haitian political history for that reason, since the arguments Haitians were having about Africa were arguments about themselves.

On 3 April 1912 the armoured cruiser Washington brought Philander C. Knox to Port-au-Prince. He was the first American secretary of state to set foot in Haiti since William Seward, and he carried a message he had already delivered in Cuba, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Santo Domingo. The Panama Canal was about to open. The Caribbean republics were to settle down. Knox told President Cincinnatus Leconte that the success of the American work of cutting a highway for world commerce depended on the peace of the countries around it, and that a state torn by internal quarrel or in default on its foreign obligations was in no position to share the benefits the canal would bring. Read that again for what it takes for granted. The nine countries on Knox's itinerary existed here as approaches to a waterway, and their politics were to be judged by how smoothly they moved American cargo.