government of Haiti barred foreigners from retail trade and stood by during the repeated anti-Levantine pogroms that followed. For two years, local newspapers (including L’Antisyrien , created expressly for the purpose) inveighed against “Levantine monsters” and “descendants of Judas,” occasionally calling for “l’extirpation des Syriens.” Only pressure from foreign powers (whose representatives were themselves ambivalent about the Levantines) prevented the expulsion orders of March 1905 from taking full effect. About 900 refugees left the country. 56 On the other side of the Atlantic, the Lebanese population of Freetown, Sierra Leone, spent eight weeks in 1919 under protective custody in the town hall and two other buildings as their property was being looted and destroyed. In the aftermath, the British Colonial Office considered wholesale deportation “in the interests of peace” but opted for continued protection. About twenty years later, the cultural commissar of an incoming prime minister of Thailand delivered a much publicized speech in which he referred to Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies and declared that “it was high time Siam considered dealing with their own Jews,” meaning ethnic Chinese (of whom he himself was one). As King Vajiravudh had written in a pamphlet entitled The Jews of the East , “in matters of money the Chinese are entirely devoid of morals and mercy. They will cheat you with a smile of satisfaction at their own perspicacity.” 57 The nearly universal condemnation of the attempted “extirpation” of the Armenians and Assyrians in Turkey and the Jews and Gypsies in Europe did little to diminish this new anti-Mercurian zeal. In the newly independent African states, “Africanization” meant, among other things, discrimination against Indian and Lebanese entrepreneurs and civil servants. In Kenya, they were squeezed out as “Asians”; in Tanzania, as “capitalists”; and in both places, as “bloodsuckers” and “leeches.” In 1972, President Idi Amin of Uganda expelled about 70,000 Indians without their assets, telling them as they went that they had “no interest in this country beyond the aim of making as much profit as possible, and at all costs.” In 1982, a coup attempt in Nairobi was followed by a massive Indian pogrom, in which about five hundred shops were looted and at least twenty women were raped. 58 In postcolonial Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese became the targets of similar nation-building efforts. In Thailand, they were excluded from twenty-seven occupations (1942), in Cambodia from eighteen (1957), and in the Philippines, relentless anti-“alien” legislation affected their ability to own or inherit certain assets and pursue most professions—while making their “alien” status much harder to escape. In 1959–60, President Sukarno’s ban on alien retail trade in Indonesia’s rural areas resulted in the hasty departure of about 130,000 Chinese,