A law lets foreign companies lease Haitian land for the long term

In December 1922 the Haitian government passed a law allowing land to be leased to foreign companies on long terms for agricultural and industrial development. The measure was aimed at American capital. Haitian law had barred foreigners from owning land since 1804, a prohibition written by men who had just fought a war to stop outsiders running plantations, and the constitution drafted under the occupation in 1918 had already begun dismantling it. Leasing was the next step, doing the work of ownership without using the word. The critic Francois Dalencour called the law the legalised assassination of the Haitian rural peasantry. His reasoning was concrete. Peasant families held small plots by long possession rather than by registered deed, so a system offering consolidated tracts to companies with lawyers threatened people who had no papers to produce. Nothing on the scale the promoters imagined ever materialised. The precedent did, and land tenure stayed the central quarrel between the Haitian state and the Haitian countryside.

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.

Growing for export did not make African villages rich. Households had to divide their land between food and cash crops while imported European manufactures undercut whatever they might have made themselves. Farmers set neither the price of what they sold nor the price of what they bought, and by the end of the 1920s a handful of European firms, the enormous United Africa Company chief among them, controlled the West African import and export trade. Between the wars the terms moved steadily against the grower. In the 1930s farmers had to plant more of the export crop and less food simply to meet the tax, which exhausted soil and produced famine, as in Niger in 1931. Growers organised. In 1929 Igbo women in Nigeria attacked the offices of the trading companies over falling export prices, and dozens died in what is remembered as the Women's War. Gold Coast cocoa farmers held their crop back until the price should rise, and the firms bought elsewhere and waited for the tax collector to do their work.

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.