Injured at nineteen, she testifies mainly that she does not drink

From her hospital bed after the collision, Estrea Jean Gilles gave a statement to the inquiry. She explained that she had a toothache and had been rinsing her mouth with tafia, the local cane spirit, and she finished with the sentence her whole testimony was built around. She did not drink. Little of the statement went on assigning blame for a broken leg that surgeons later amputated. Most of it went on establishing that she had not been drunk and was not the kind of woman who got drunk. She would have known that witnesses at the scene had smelled alcohol, and she would have known what the occupation's officers did with that detail when the injured party was a Haitian market woman. At nineteen, with one leg, she was protecting the only asset the accident had left her, a reputation solid enough to keep her trusted by customers on the same streets where the car hit her. Carolle Charles argues that poor Haitian women have always set the terms of their own respectability.

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.

Dartiguenave held the presidency through the most violent years of the occupation under American military supervision. By 1922 he was protesting the transfer of Haitian money into American banks, and Washington removed him, installing Louis Borno alongside Major General John Russell as high commissioner. The Borno and Russell government ran the country, ignored the violence around it, and denied what it could not ignore. Under Major Smedley Butler the Americans revived the corvée, a labour draft with precedents in French colonial rule and in Henry Christophe's building of the Citadelle. Conscription was indiscriminate. Butler wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, that it would not do to ask too many questions about how the work was done. People walked long routes through the mountains to keep off the roads. The brutality filled the ranks of the Cacos under Charlemagne Péralte and Benoît Batraville, who took their tactics from Dessalines. Fighting between Cacos and Marines killed more than 2,250 Haitians in the first decade, some in combat and some at the hands of careless or predatory Marines.