Sannon tells the new historical society that the past is a recovery plan

On 1 May 1925 H. P. Sannon addressed the newly formed Societe d'Histoire et de Geographie d'Haiti on why historical study mattered. His argument was that a nation could not recover from foreign rule without first searching its own past. Sannon was not a young man making a literary gesture. He had been a Haitian diplomat and a historian of Toussaint Louverture, and he was speaking in the tenth year of an American occupation that had dissolved the legislature, rewritten the constitution and put a foreign officer's signature on every budget line. What remained to a Haitian public was argument, and argument requires grounds. Sannon's proposition was that the grounds were historical, that a people able to show what they had built and what they had defeated could reason about what they were owed now. Scholarship in Haiti during these years was a form of politics conducted where the marines were not looking, and the men who founded the society said as much at the opening session.

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.