Brouard dedicates a column to Normil Sylvain

Carl Brouard published an article in Le Petit Impartial on 9 February 1929 dedicated to Normil Sylvain, his colleague from La Revue Indigene, and used it to declare himself with the writers who were arguing that Haitian culture had to stop measuring itself against Europe. Dedications in small papers usually mean little. This one was a signal of alignment at a bad moment. Roumain and Petit, who ran the paper, had been arrested eight weeks earlier. The review that Sylvain had launched in 1927 had lost momentum. And Sylvain himself was near the end of his life, dying later that year. Brouard was saying in public that the position stood whatever happened to the men holding it. Eight months later the strike at Damien turned the argument of these magazines into a national movement, and the writers who had spent two years insisting that Haiti was African rather than provincial French found the whole student population agreeing with them.

Adolf Hitler had helped found the National Socialist party by 1920 and led it by 1921. It grew slowly through the decade, claiming over a hundred thousand members and 810,000 votes in the Reichstag elections of 1928. Then came the world economic crisis. German unemployment climbed to three million during 1930 and Nazi party membership doubled. At the polls in September 1930 the Nazi vote leapt to 6.4 million and Hitler commanded the second largest party in the Reichstag with 107 seats. The Weimar Republic had carried the defeat of 1918 and the terms of Versailles from its birth, had watched France occupy the Ruhr in 1923 after a reparations default, and had survived the hyperinflation that followed. It did not survive the depression. The economic collapse that put millions of Americans out of work put Hitler within reach of the German state.

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.