A million more black southerners go north when the quotas close

Half a million black Americans had already left the rural South for northern factories during the First World War. When Congress choked off European immigration in 1924, northern industry needed new hands, and by the end of the decade another million African Americans had left the old slave states for the Northeast and the upper Midwest, along with about half a million Mexicans, who were exempt from the new quotas. They found work in metal shops, car plants and packing houses. Only about a hundred thousand black Americans lived west of the Rockies. The political effect showed in 1928, when the Chicago alderman Oscar De Priest became the first black member of Congress since Reconstruction and the first ever from a northern district. The same quota law and the same factory demand shaped where Caribbean migrants could go in these years.

Ainsi parla l'Oncle, essais d'ethnologie, was printed at Compiegne in France in 1928, four preliminary pages and 243 pages of text. Its preface is dated Petionville, 15 December 1927, and states the aim: to raise the value of Haitian folklore in the eyes of the Haitian people. Haiti had then been occupied by the United States for thirteen years, and educated Haitians had spent a century trying to be coloured Frenchmen, in a country where the word African was the most humiliating thing one could say to a compatriot. The book took the beliefs, songs, tales, dances and ceremonies of the peasantry, traced them to Dahomey and the Kongo, and handled them with the apparatus of ethnography. It gave a generation of Haitian writers a defensible reason to look at their own country. A second edition appeared in New York in 1951, a Spanish translation in Havana in 1968, a third edition in Montreal in 1973, and an English translation in Washington in 1984.

From the end of the 1930s colonial administrations in Africa began pushing plantation farming on the North American model, planned in offices and imposed on rural districts. The intervention was heavy handed and it produced resentment in the countryside that lasted for decades. It also broke something political. British rule across much of Africa worked through indirect rule, which governed villages by way of chiefs recognised, paid and sometimes invented by the colonial power. Agricultural planners dealt with land, labour and quotas themselves and went around those chiefs. The authority of men who already carried the stigma of collaboration drained away, since Africans in many walks of life had long treated the whole arrangement as irrelevant to them. Colonial power was dismantling its own local scaffolding while still leaning on it. What remained was a rural population with fresh grievances and a set of traditional authorities with no credit left to spend, which cleared the ground for a generation of nationalist leaders who owed those authorities nothing.

The Greeks of Anatolia were the last of the minorities to leave, exchanged in 1924 for the Turkish population living in Greece. What remained was a country in which Turks were an overwhelming majority. The state had arrived before the nation, and the new leadership then had to find something that would hold the population together. The Turkish language was declared a national characteristic and stirred very little feeling. Islam was what actually commanded loyalty and produced internal unity, so the officially secular state made full use of it. The working test of Turkishness was religion rather than language, which shows in the reluctance to encourage the immigration of the Turkish speaking Christian Gagauz of Bessarabia and in the willingness to let the Turkish speaking Christian Karamanlis depart. Property left by the departing minorities was sold cheaply under a special law to the craftsmen, small merchants and local notables who became the new middle class.