Senators arrive in Haiti for hearings already decided

The McCormick committee, set up after Hiram Johnson's call in February 1921 for an investigation of the invasions of Haiti and Santo Domingo, moved its hearings from Washington to Port-au-Prince. The Union Patriotique organised a large demonstration for the senators' arrival, with banners against the presence of foreign troops. Sylvain testified alongside Pierre Hudicourt of the national law school and the journalist Joseph Jolibois of the Courrier Haitien, just out of prison on a charge of slandering the occupation. Securing ordinary witnesses proved harder, since people who had seen relatives victimised feared reprisals once the committee sailed, a situation Sylvain described as intimidation and terror. Pamphile's verdict is blunt: the senators had already endorsed Sumner Welles's July 1921 recommendations for a loan, an improved gendarmerie and a marine officer as the president's personal representative, and they simply reaffirmed the need for American control.

The Turkish nationalists beat the Greek army in 1922 and the armistice of Mudanya of 11 October ended the foreign occupation on terms close to what they had demanded. Both Ankara and Istanbul were then invited to send delegations to the peace conference at Lausanne, which offered the sultan a chance to recover his standing at the expense of the modernists who held power in Ankara. On 1 November 1922 the National Assembly, pressed by Mustafa Kemal, abolished the sultanate outright and declared that the sultan's authority had in fact ended on 16 March 1920. Kemal defended the separation of sultan and caliph as closer to the practice of early Islam, and said that the house of Osman had seized a sovereignty that belonged to the Turkish nation and that the nation had now taken it back. The Lausanne treaty followed on 24 July 1923.

When sleeping sickness spread, administrations in Nyasaland and Tanganyika moved entire populations out of the infected districts. The land left behind became the game parks the tourist industry now sells, which is the whole colonial arrangement in one object. Colonial rule and the global market had deepened the environmental crisis and imported new diseases. The same rule then reversed part of the damage, clearing bush for commercial farming, controlling game and pushing the tsetse fly back. European medicine treated old diseases along with the ones Europeans had carried in. Colonial roads and railways could in principle move relief to a district where the harvest had failed faster than anything before them. Africans across the continent found their capacity to manage their own affairs cut down by the system, and the same system opened commercial and eventually political ground. From the 1920s onward fertility rose, the rains steadied and the population of Africa began the climb it has not stopped. The recovery is usually credited to the pax colonia. It was accomplished by the people who lived through it.

Louis Borno was elected president of Haiti in 1922 and became the chief Haitian instrument of the American administration. He did not treat the role as a humiliation. He described the occupation as paternalism in the honourable sense, a beneficent application of the duty a Christian people owed the weak, and he governed on that understanding for eight years. The practical content of the theory was plain. Borno prosecuted and jailed his political opponents, harried the press when it suited him, and stayed in office on American arms before a public that had no way of removing him, since no legislative elections were held. Nicholls records that the regime was unpopular at the start and unpopular at the end. Borno matters because he supplies the model of the collaborating executive that Haitian politics returned to repeatedly: a cultivated man of the capital, fluent in the language of duty and improvement, whose authority came from a foreign garrison and evaporated the moment that garrison lost interest.