Brouard reviews Price-Mars and calls the book a revolution

Carl Brouard reviewed Ainsi parla l'oncle for Le Petit Impartial on 13 October 1928 and welcomed it without reservation. Jean Price-Mars had argued that the African inheritance in Haitian life, in its religion, its language and its ways of working the land, was a real inheritance and a creditable one. Brouard called the book revolutionary because it granted that inheritance a value, and because no book of standing by a Haitian of Price-Mars's reputation had done so before. The review is a small event with a large function. It put the seal of the young writers on the work of an older, respectable man, a doctor and diplomat of sixty-two, and it announced that the literary movement of 1927 and the ethnology of 1928 were the same undertaking. From that point the argument had both a scholarly text and a magazine willing to fight for it. Every later Haitian quarrel about colour, class and culture is conducted in the terms these two set that autumn.

Prices broke on Wednesday 23 October 1929 in a wave of selling that moved over six million shares and wiped out about four billion dollars on paper, with the ticker running two hours behind. On Black Thursday, 24 October, a record 12,894,650 shares were traded, losses reached nine billion by noon and the ticker finished four hours late at eight minutes past seven in the evening. On Tuesday 29 October, 16,410,000 shares changed hands, a record that stood for thirty nine years. The slide went on for three more weeks. Buying on margin had multiplied gains on the way up and it worked the same way in reverse, since a small fall in a price forced the loan to be called and the stock to be sold. By the middle of November some twenty six billion dollars, roughly a third of the value recorded in September, had gone.

Every Dahomean who died became a god of his family, and each year the household performed the customs for its ancestors. Herskovits recorded in 1931 that the sacrifices were not confined to the dead whose names people could still recite. At a separate altar, food was given to the spirits of those who had been sent into slavery and to their descendants, together with others whose names had been lost. As the offering was made, the names of New World countries were spoken in order to call the family dead. The practice was still running in the villages of Dahomey more than sixty years after the Atlantic trade ended and well over a century after the last large shipments to Saint Domingue. Herskovits singled it out as the most significant thing the field trip produced for anyone studying the relation between Africans and people of African descent in the Americas.

The Ottoman empire left its successor states a debt owed mostly to French financiers. The new Turkish Republic negotiated its own share down by half. Syria and Lebanon, held under French mandate, went on paying theirs in full, and 164 million francs left the common revenue fund between 1929 and 1934. The same fund carried the Armee du Levant, estimated at 40,000 men in 1926, together with irregular units, the gendarmerie and a large body of imported experts and administrators. Taxes raised locally were held above what the civilian side of government was allowed to spend, and the difference paid for soldiers and creditors. That transfer was 16 percent of civilian revenue in 1928. By the mid 1930s it had reached 30 to 40 percent, and in 1937 it approached 70 percent. Customs rates in the mandate stood near 30 percent of import value while Egypt, Palestine and Iraq charged 15 to 20.