1910–1911: (Made in Germany: Leconte’s German Connections and the Merchants’ Gamble): Other than the brand of Consolidard, the most noticeable label borne by…

1910–1911: (Made in Germany: Leconte’s German Connections and the Merchants’ Gamble): Other than the brand of Consolidard, the most noticeable label borne by Leconte seemed to be “Made in Germany.” As a boy he had been sent to school in Mainz; as a young man he had worked in the German consulate at the Cap. German firms had bankrolled his political rise, though not with entire disinterest: after the new president obtained an initial stake of two million gourdes from the German merchants, Perl, the German minister, was heard to gloat that they would have control of the customs houses before the end of the year. The German investment in Leconte — education, employment, financing — represented the culmination of a half-century of Hohenzollern commercial penetration that had begun with Batsch’s excrement-smeared flags in 1872 and progressed through Thiele’s ultimatum, Panther’s destruction of La Crête-à-Pierrot, and the systematic bankrolling of revolutions whose bonds were purchased at ten cents on the dollar. Yet what the German merchants did not foresee — what the extractive logic of their own engagement rendered invisible — was that the man they had financed would prove to be precisely the leader who would refuse to be their instrument, a reversal that Glissant might read as the characteristic opacity of Caribbean subjectivity: the colonizer’s investment in what he assumes to be a compliant client produces instead an autonomous agent whose inner purposes remain fundamentally illegible to the metropolitan gaze.