Borno praises American paternalism and is quoted in Washington

On 3 January 1929 Louis Borno told the Council of State that the American administration had brought paternalistic benefits to Haiti. The High Commissioner then quoted the speech in his own report to Washington as evidence that foreign rule ought to continue. The circuit is the whole occupation in miniature. Borno held the presidency because the Americans supported him, and the Council of State that heard him was an appointed body, not an elected one, since the elected legislature had been dissolved and never replaced. So the American authority produced a Haitian president, the president produced a compliment, and the American authority forwarded the compliment home as proof that Haitians were content. Nothing entered the record that had not been placed there by the occupation itself. Ten months later students walked out at Damien, the country followed them, and marines shot twelve peasants at Les Cayes. Borno announced he would not stand again, and he left office in May 1930.

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.

Growing for export did not make African villages rich. Households had to divide their land between food and cash crops while imported European manufactures undercut whatever they might have made themselves. Farmers set neither the price of what they sold nor the price of what they bought, and by the end of the 1920s a handful of European firms, the enormous United Africa Company chief among them, controlled the West African import and export trade. Between the wars the terms moved steadily against the grower. In the 1930s farmers had to plant more of the export crop and less food simply to meet the tax, which exhausted soil and produced famine, as in Niger in 1931. Growers organised. In 1929 Igbo women in Nigeria attacked the offices of the trading companies over falling export prices, and dozens died in what is remembered as the Women's War. Gold Coast cocoa farmers held their crop back until the price should rise, and the firms bought elsewhere and waited for the tax collector to do their work.

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.