The two editors of Le Petit Impartial are arrested together

Jacques Roumain and Georges Petit were arrested on 13 December 1928 for what they had been printing against the American occupation. The case against them was sedition, which in a country under military occupation means writing things the occupier would rather not see in print. Both had spent the year attacking Louis Borno in Le Petit Impartial, and the arrest was the government's answer to eight months of it. It answered nothing. A prosecution of two journalists is an admission that the argument cannot be met, and it moved both men out of the small world of literary Port-au-Prince and into the national one. Roumain was twenty-one and became, in a matter of weeks, the name every student in the capital knew. Ten months after the arrests the agricultural school at Damien walked out, and the strike that followed spread through every faculty in the country and ended with marines shooting peasants at Les Cayes.

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.

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.