The photograph of Péralte's body is circulated as a warning

On 1 November 1919 United States Marines killed Charlemagne Péralte. His body was stripped, lashed to a door and photographed in a posture that read as a crucifixion, and the picture was circulated around Haiti so that anyone thinking of joining the rebellion would see it. The French had done the same thing in 1791 with Boukman's head on a pike outside Cap Francais. The result was the same both times. Péralte became a permanent figure in Haitian memory and his image the standard picture of resistance to foreign occupation, reproduced by Haitian painters for the rest of the century. More than two thousand Haitians died in the Caco rebellion. Fewer than a hundred Americans and gendarmes were killed. The disparity brought the campaign to the attention of the United States Senate, which held an inquiry in 1921 and concluded that the marines should stay. They stayed another fifteen years.

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.

In January 1919 word reached Port-au-Prince that things were wrong at Hinche, out on the Plateau Central at the end of the new road. The corvée had officially stopped the previous October and was still running. Peasants ran into the bush at the sight of a gendarme. Prisoners taken by the marines were shot or simply vanished. Colonel Williams reported the charges baseless on the word of the district commander, Major Clarke Wells. Lieutenant Colonel Hooker went up and came back with the opposite finding. General Catlin, carrying a lung half destroyed at Belleau Wood, then went himself to Saint Michel, Maïssade and Hinche and talked to priests, magistrats and frightened peasants. The corvée was in full operation, prisoners had been shot with escape given as the reason every time, and Wells had made clear to his subordinates that he did not want prisoners reported. Catlin relieved Wells, moved every Gendarmerie officer out of the district, and brought courts martial against nobody. General Barnett read of indiscriminate killing in a court record that September and demanded an inquiry.