A general tells the Senate that Haitians were minors in his care

Testifying before the Senate select committee that investigated the occupation in 1921 and 1922, General Smedley Butler said that the men who ran it understood themselves as trustees of a large estate belonging to minors, that Haitians were wards and that the Americans were building a rich and productive property to be handed over when their own government saw fit. Renda builds her argument on this. Historians have treated paternalism either as a genuine benevolence, or as a mitigating factor, or as rhetoric to be seen through, and she rejects all three. Paternalism was a whole constellation of images and values that shaped American relations with former European colonies, an assertion of authority and control expressed through the metaphor of fatherhood, structured as much by discipline as by care. On her reading it was not opposed to violence but one of the cultural vehicles for it. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda rejects both the view that paternalism softened the occupation and the view that it was mere cover story, arguing it was an operative mechanism of violence.

On 10 March 1922 the old battleship North Dakota carried General John Russell down the Gulf of La Gonave toward Port-au-Prince. He had smelled the city once before, as a midshipman in 1893, and had written in his journal that it was the filthiest place he had ever set eyes on and that he hoped never to return. He went ashore the next morning as American high commissioner, met by the magistrat communal, an honour guard of gendarmes, the palace band and a crowd well practised at cheering new rulers of Haiti. His first directive settled the shape of the next eight years. All correspondence between treaty officials and the Haitian government, Washington or each other would pass through his office, and no statement of policy, draft law or budget line could issue without his approval. The Haitian president, his ministers and the Conseil d'Etat kept the ceremony. Russell kept the valve. He compared the arrangement openly to Lord Cromer's Egypt, one foreign race governing a second in order to rule a third.

The oldest movement in sub-Saharan Africa that can fairly be called nationalist was at the southern end of the continent. The South African Native National Congress was founded in 1912 and became the African National Congress in 1923. Elsewhere, politics on the scale of a whole territory was rare before the Second World War. It worked in small colonies that resembled a precolonial state, and it worked in Tanganyika, where Swahili was spoken widely enough to carry a message from one end to the other. The Tanganyikan African Association was founded in 1929 with branches across the territory. The war pushed matters forward through hardship and sharpened political awareness. Colonial schooling, restricted as it was, produced elites who meant to build European style nation states in Africa and who then had to close the distance between themselves and everybody else. Women organised and campaigned, and were promised an equality that independence did not deliver. Nationalism had to supply an identity for peoples a European mapmaker had grouped together. It usually failed.

Amir Faysal, driven out of Syria by the French in the summer of 1920, was proclaimed king of Iraq on 23 August 1921. General Gouraud had already proclaimed the state of Greater Lebanon with Beirut as its capital on 1 September 1920, and on 24 July 1922 the League of Nations Council gave its approval to the mandates covering Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine together with Transjordan. In the British sphere Egypt was the first to be granted formal independence, by a declaration of 21 February 1922 that ended the protectorate while reserving a list of British rights, and a constitution of 19 April 1923 made it a hereditary monarchy under King Fuad. Zeine treats the years from 1918 to 1920 as the decisive ones. Arab nationalism took its modern shape in them, living on resentment of Anglo French domination and on opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine.