Peralte is killed in an ambush and armed resistance collapses

Pamphile records the death of Charlemagne Peralte, ambushed by the occupiers, as the end of the only real military challenge to American control. The men who had followed him into the hills were called bandits and outlaws in American accounts, and the marines had mounted a full-scale campaign to destroy them. Johnson's report put the toll at roughly three thousand Haitians against thirteen marines. Pamphile uses the timing to explain what the NAACP visit changed. By the time Johnson reached Haiti the expeditionary force had effectively pacified the country, and the nationalist opposition was demoralised and unorganised. What Johnson supplied was not arms but a method, and Pamphile argues that his conversations revived the energy of Haitian nationalists and redirected their struggle from the hills into organisation, publication and legal argument in the capital and in Washington.

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.

The plan for the night of 31 October 1919 was that Conzé would attack Grande Rivière while Péralte waited at Masère in the river gorge. The marines knew both halves of it. Meade brought gendarmes and a machine gun section quietly into the barracks at Grande Rivière, and blocking positions went out on every trail from Saint Raphaël to Vallière. Hanneken took eighteen picked gendarmes and Lieutenant William Button, dressed them as Cacos in worn denim, and blacked his own face and Button's with burned cork. Seven hundred Cacos filed past their ambush and Péralte was not among them. Jean-Edmond François then brought word that Péralte was waiting in camp for a detachment to fetch him in. Hanneken's party became that detachment and climbed through six Caco outposts using the password General Jean, chosen as a compliment to Conzé. At the last one a sentry tried to inspect Button's automatic rifle and Button snapped at him in Creole and pushed on. François pointed out a man in a blue shirt beside a small fire. Hanneken shot him twice through the heart.