Charlier asks who governs and who is governed in Haiti

In November 1925 Etienne Charlier published Gouvernants et gouvernes in La Nouvelle Ronde, an essay on the relation between the Haitian elite and the Haitian masses. He was young and the piece was early work. It marks the point at which the question that occupied him for the rest of his life was first set down: what exactly connects the few thousand families of the capital and the provincial towns to the several million people in the countryside whose labour supports them. The literary generation around him was answering with culture, arguing that the elite had lost touch with the country's African inheritance. Charlier went toward class and property instead. He became a Marxist and eventually wrote Apercu sur la formation historique de la nation haitienne, which reread the revolution of 1791 to 1804 as a social conflict rather than a pageant of great men. Twenty years of Haitian radical thought began in student reviews like this one, printed under occupation.

American farmers had ploughed marginal land and bought tractors to feed the world during the war. The number of motor vehicles on farms multiplied fivefold in the war years to about eighty five thousand, and by the end of the 1920s nearly a million farmers were driving them. Nine million work animals were slaughtered as machines replaced them, releasing thirty million acres of pasture for wheat, cotton and dairying. When world production returned to its normal channels after the armistice of November 1918, the surplus had nowhere to go. Cotton fell from a wartime high of thirty five cents a pound to sixteen cents in 1920. Corn fell from a dollar and a half a bushel to fifty two cents, wool from nearly sixty cents a pound to under twenty. Prices improved a little after 1921 and did not recover fully until war returned in 1939. Foreclosures rose and owners became tenants.

Competition for work and for access to the colonial economy hardened ethnic identity, because solidarity in a scramble means sorting people into groups and caricaturing the ones you are outside. The mines had begun with migrant labour: men on short contracts who came from the countryside, took the wages and went home, described as urban tribesmen raiding the industrial economy. From the 1920s the contracts lengthened and companies settled workers with their families near the shafts, which produced a permanent urban working class. Johannesburg was the largest case, built on gold. Lagos, Leopoldville, Nairobi and Salisbury grew through the same years on people walking in from the countryside. Reid calls this migration the most important single theme in Africa's modern social history. New arrivals kept village ties and rebuilt rural custom in town, and competition kept ethnic loyalty useful. The towns also mixed everyone together, and intermarriage and shared work produced urban cultures of their own. Women found in them some distance from the authority of the homestead.

Sir Francis Watts reported on agricultural conditions in Dominica in 1927 and recommended a Peasant Information Bureau under an appointed Peasant Adviser, charged with supervising the cultivation and export of crops grown by small proprietors. The bureau opened the following year and one of the island's most prominent planters, J. C. MacIntyre, took the post of Adviser under the local executive. On 17 October 1928 the administrator asked the Colonial Office for permission to move five hundred pounds from Loan Board funds to the bureau to set up a Vegetables Growers Association. It was granted. MacIntyre drafted the by laws himself. The associates would be the peasants, whom he described as more or less illiterate and whose attendance at meetings he called undesirable; they would be represented by the heads of their local centres, and the Adviser would sit as chairman, treasurer and secretary at once. Ninety years after abolition the word peasant was finally respectable in Dominica, and the first institution built around it kept a planter at its head.