Three hundred thousand Caribbean people are in the United States

By the 1920s more than three hundred thousand residents of the United States were of Caribbean derivation, the accumulated result of migration out of the islands after emancipation. They arrived just as the Great Migration was bringing millions of rural African Americans into northern cities, so the two movements met in the same neighbourhoods and pressed the same demand for inclusion in American society. Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887, built the Universal Negro Improvement Association into an organisation that linked struggles for Black equality across the Atlantic. Hubert Harrison, born in the Danish West Indies in 1883, supplied much of the writing that fuelled the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, alongside the Jamaican American poet Claude McKay. In Martinique at the same period Aime Cesaire was formulating negritude as a literary answer to white racism. The redefinition of Black art in the United States came in large part from people born in the islands.

By the early 1920s the American military declared the caco wars won. The proof it offered was Charlemagne Peralte, the caco leader and intellectual, captured and killed in 1919, his naked body arranged to resemble a crucifixion and photographed, the photograph then circulated through a country that knew exactly what image was being used against it. Reports of continued killing kept reaching Washington and the Senate opened investigations. In 1920 Admiral H. S. Knapp, who had served in Haiti and said he had studied conditions there thoroughly, was asked whether some three thousand Haitian men, women and children had been shot since 1915 by troops under American command. He answered that it was very possible three thousand Haitian men in all had been killed, and that the operations were necessary to restore order and a respect for human life and property. The life and property in danger, on his account, were endangered by Haitians. The killing of people in their own country went into the record as the price of governing them.

Japan defeated Russia in 1905. It was the first time in the modern era that a non European power had beaten a European empire in a full scale war, and the news travelled fast through every territory then under European rule. The practical consequences were in Asia. The consequences that mattered elsewhere were about what people believed was possible. Colonial administration rested on the claim that European supremacy was a fact of nature and not an outcome of gunnery, industry and organisation, and Tsushima made that claim harder to state with a straight face. Nicholls places the Japanese victory among the events that fed the growth of black consciousness in the years before the First World War, in Haiti and in the wider black world. Haiti had made the same argument in 1804 by destroying Napoleon's army, and had been punished for a century for making it. In 1905 the argument was made again by somebody else, and this time Europe had to concede the point in public.

Under Francois Duvalier the Haitian state built a small number of large projects: an airport, a dam, and a model town called Duvalierville laid out in modernist architecture as a Haitian answer to Brasilia. The showpiece was meant to demonstrate that the regime could produce a modern country. It could not compensate for what was leaving. Capital and people went out of Haiti through the 1960s in numbers no state investment matched, and the private building that normally shapes a city had almost stopped, because middle income and elite Haitians would not put money into property in a country where the state might take it, or take them. A capital whose physical form is made by thousands of small private decisions stood still for a decade. What Port-au-Prince looked like in 2010 was therefore decided in the years after 1971 rather than before.