A high commissioner lands and every paper crosses his desk

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 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.

A commercial and professional class in British West Africa founded the National Congress of British West Africa. It ran branches in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. Through the 1920s it extracted the concession of elected African members in the territorial legislatures, most effectively in the coastal towns where this class had matured. The Congress produced offshoots, among them the West African Students' Union, which gave young West Africans in London a place to argue and introduced them to pan-African ideas. Its leaders thought regionally on a practical calculation, since no single colony could face Britain by itself. Many of them held that organising along colonial boundaries made no sense, those boundaries having been drawn by Europeans for European convenience. Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria carried the argument. British officials meanwhile regarded their tropical African possessions as mere geographical units and saw no reason to worry about nationalism in them. Within one generation those units were sovereign states, governed by men who had been students in London.

In December 1921 a United States Senate commission was in Haiti investigating reports of atrocities committed during the occupation. Senator Medill McCormick questioned Jean Marie Jan, the French Catholic bishop of Cap Haitien. Jan called the occupation an act of kindness, then explained the war against the Americans by saying the people had been driven to desperation by arbitrariness, injustice and mistreatment and had proclaimed their right to defend themselves. Asked whether Vodou had diminished since the landing, he answered that it had increased, and that the greatest cause was that the boko had been the soul of the insurrection. He also asked whether Washington intended to impose Protestantism by force. He had grounds. Edwin Denby, the American under secretary of the navy, was writing to E. O. Watson of the Council of Churches that Haiti lay within the sphere of the United States and that the Navy Department would be happy to facilitate the work of the missionary societies.