The New York Times prints a land speculator as a martyr of the marines

Portions of Lifschitz's letters and Siegel's reflections appeared under a headline presenting him as an accuser of the marines held as a prisoner. Casey shows the machinery behind the story. In early 1920 Lifschitz had asked M. D. Bazalay, the Haitian head of the post office at Saint Louis du Sud, to manufacture proof that a marine was interfering with his mail. He never got the fabricated evidence, but he convinced Siegel that he could not send correspondence out of Haiti, and letters that had almost certainly been delayed as a ruse arrived through a soap manufacturing firm rather than the ordinary channel. Four days after the first story the paper reported that radio instructions had been sent to Haiti to protect him. Casey's point is that Lifschitz had mastered the language and the transnational channels of the Haitian opposition and used them against Haitians. Where this account departs from the standard one: Casey argues that Lifschitz's reputation outside southern Haiti as a man who spoke truth to power was undeserved, since his narrative that business went well until the occupation distorts the fact that his wealth increased dramatically under American rule.

The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919. John Maynard Keynes named three fatal defects in it that same year. It transferred German coal, iron and steel properties to France and barred German industry from using them, which struck at the organisation of production itself. It stripped Germany of colonies, foreign investments and merchant shipping and limited her control of her own waterways and tariffs. Then it charged this weakened country some thirty three billion dollars in reparations. Article 231 required the Germans to accept sole responsibility for the war. Prince Fumimaro Konoye of Japan, then twenty seven, published an article urging his countrymen to reject a peace built around Britain and the United States which refused to write racial equality into the settlement. Two decades later Konoye was premier and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

The Summary Conviction Offenses Ordinance of 19 May 1921 defined obeah in Trinidad as any pretended assumption of supernatural power or knowledge for fraudulent or illicit ends, for gain, or to injure a person. Conviction before a magistrate carried up to six months in prison, with or without hard labour. A man could be sentenced to corporal punishment on top of it. A woman could be held in solitary confinement, three days at a stretch and a month in all. A justice could issue a warrant on the oath of one credible witness to search any premises by day or night and seize what was found. The police manual advised that convictions usually needed paid informers, and noted that no intent to defraud had to be proved. The same ordinance forbade drums, gongs, tambours, bangees and chac-chacs between ten at night and six in the morning, banned the bongo dance, and set a penalty of ten pounds with the instruments forfeited.

Through the 1920s and 1930s the export crops of tropical Africa came off small African farms. The change of those two decades was the lorry. Roads spread, motor transport followed them, and commercial agriculture reached villages the railways had left alone. Market towns filled up. African cultivators, mostly men using the labour of the women in their households, opened new ground for export crops. After a generation of conquest the 1920s were steady and comparatively prosperous, and the population grew. The communities forming out of this were part peasant and part capitalist, and European administrations disliked them. Officials preferred chiefs they had appointed and were wary of African businessmen who would eventually want politics as well as profit. The weakness in the arrangement was visible before the crash came. African producers had no way to move a world price, and what Africa sold remained crops, timber and minerals. In parts of West Africa the trade of the nineteenth century simply carried on under a new flag.