Roumain tells the priests they may take up arms

On 20 June 1928 Jacques Roumain wrote that a priest had every right to be a soldier when the homeland stood in danger. The line was aimed at a specific institution. The Catholic clergy in Haiti at that date were overwhelmingly French, they controlled most of the schooling available to the elite, and they had made their peace with the American occupation without much visible difficulty. Telling them they could take up arms was a way of telling them they had not, and of removing the last excuse available to anyone who wanted to sit the thing out. Roumain was writing to enlist, not to persuade in the abstract. He wanted lawyers, students, shopkeepers, teachers and priests to understand themselves as belonging to one occupied population with one obligation. Two years later the strike that broke the occupation's political nerve started with agriculture students and spread to the law faculty, the medical school and the customs houses. The argument that everybody was implicated turned out to be correct.

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.

France governed Lebanon and four Syrian states from 1920 to 1943 under a League of Nations mandate that obliged it to publish annual accounts. Those reports have been reassembled into comparable budget series. In 1928, once the cost of the Armee du Levant is counted, 74 percent of everything the mandate spent went to administration, the judiciary and security. Education took 3.8 percent and health 1.5 percent. Infrastructure and support for production took 15.6 percent. In French North Africa the same categories ran at 9.1 percent for education, 6.7 for health and 49.8 for infrastructure. Schools and clinics in Lebanon were left to missionaries and private bodies, which produced a system that served Christians well and left the Muslim population badly short. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because it is the same arithmetic Haiti met from the other side: money raised locally, spent on the apparatus that raised it, and gone.