Concrete is poured over Peralte's body in a camp at Chabert

After the corpse was displayed in the square at Grande-Riviere, carried by train to Cap-Haitien and put on show crucified against a door in the arsenal yard from half past twelve until nightfall, the American command hesitated over what to do with it. Michel says General Russell decided to bury it at the camp at Chabert, which he calls an extermination camp. The truck carrying the body left the Cap that evening with Hanneken riding along, arriving at twenty to one in the morning. The body was lowered wrapped in burlap sacking and draped in the blue and red of the flag, a grave was dug at once, and by three the burial was finished. Peralte was placed in the ground without a coffin by four soldiers, and concrete was poured over him for fear that he might rise or be stolen, then covered with soil.

Nikolai Kondratieff described long economic waves in the 1920s. Others had described such cycles before him, and his account of how they work is no longer widely accepted. The name stuck anyway. Wallerstein's version turns on monopoly. Significant profit requires selling well above the cost of production, which requires a quasi monopoly, so any period of real expansion has a few leading products that are relatively monopolised and enormously profitable. Monopolies then destroy themselves, because new producers eventually get past the barriers, competition rises, prices fall and profits fall with them. The expansion phase and the stagnation phase together have usually run fifty to sixty years. Sugar and coffee were leading products of exactly this kind, and the fortunes made in Saint-Domingue before 1791 belong to an upswing, while the collapse of Haitian export prices in the following century belongs to the other half of the cycle.

Across Africa the colonial administrations wanted the same three things. They wanted revenue, raised by a tax levied on every head or every hut, which for most Africans was the first plain evidence that they no longer governed themselves. They wanted labour, and a tax payable in cash was the instrument for producing it. They wanted cash crops and minerals moving outward. Schools and clinics stayed in missionary hands into the 1920s and the state itself was absent from most of daily life. What it did build was transport. Railways and roads tied the continent to the world economy, and Reid calls that the deepest thing colonialism left behind. During the 1920s a good many Africans thought the arrangement might work for them, since organised violence had fallen off, cash crops and migrant wages were available, and populations were recovering from the disasters of the previous thirty years. The Depression closed that opening. By the middle of the 1930s officials were complaining about the aimlessness and the brutality of their own system.

Dartiguenave held the presidency through the most violent years of the occupation under American military supervision. By 1922 he was protesting the transfer of Haitian money into American banks, and Washington removed him, installing Louis Borno alongside Major General John Russell as high commissioner. The Borno and Russell government ran the country, ignored the violence around it, and denied what it could not ignore. Under Major Smedley Butler the Americans revived the corvée, a labour draft with precedents in French colonial rule and in Henry Christophe's building of the Citadelle. Conscription was indiscriminate. Butler wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, that it would not do to ask too many questions about how the work was done. People walked long routes through the mountains to keep off the roads. The brutality filled the ranks of the Cacos under Charlemagne Péralte and Benoît Batraville, who took their tactics from Dessalines. Fighting between Cacos and Marines killed more than 2,250 Haitians in the first decade, some in combat and some at the hands of careless or predatory Marines.