A very informative article on the history of Haiti by Jon Henley apears in The Guardian. He points out that Haiti’s problems began the moment they acheived their freedom from the French in 1804, after 12 years of war. The first free state in all of the Americas. The French demanded reparations for their assets destroyed in the war. The Haitians began borrowing from U.S. banks to pay those reparations, thus began a history of indebtedness that continues to this day. Every time Haiti threatened to suspend debt repayments the U.S. would send in the marines.
What I would like to know is, what is the total amount Hait has paid to the U.S. over all those years. I imagine it would be quite a sum. If anyone out there could come up with a figure I would be most interested.
The money, 150 million francs, was demanded in 1825, as the price of recognition by France. It was reduced to 60 million francs in 1838. Boyer agreed to it, and it did hurt Haiti’s economy, but as far as I know, most of the money was borrowed from French banks, not US ones.
The big debts to US banks (and more French, as well as German banks) were incurred at the end of the 19th century. US troops were sent into and occupied Haiti from 1915-1934. The official reason was because of a massacre of political prisoners by the President, Guilliame Sam, but there are some people who argue that it was to stop a rebel, Rosalvo Bobo, who supported nationalization and didn’t like the US, from coming to power.
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Link to article? I’ve browsed the Guardian’s site but can’t find it.
The Times says that Haiti originally owed France 150m Francs in gold, later reduced to 60m, and they paid off these reparations with interest in 1947, to a large extent through borrowing from the US, Germany and, bizarrely, France. The figure being banded around on Google is that 60m francs is roughly $8.5 billion. If we assume Haiti took a loan with the US for a third of that, and then paid interest on it every year, they’ve probably ended up owing the US over $5 billion (obviously they haven’t repaid it all yet).
One question I have is: why did the Haitians agree to pay France the reparations in the first place? If they didn’t agree with being enslaved and defeated the French in battle, why then agree to pay them an unimaginably large amount of money just because they ask for it?
The U.S. declared its independence in 1776, and it was acknowledged by the U.K. in 1783.
A thread about the Staff Report on Haiti and its alleged pact with the Devil: "Pact with the devil" column - Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports - Straight Dope Message Board
could it be from generalized stupidity? Stupidity of the same kind that drives some other governments to build very tall skyscrapers or subsidize millions of college kids getting “English lit” degrees or even to try to rebuild Haiti as a prosperous and democratic nation?
I personally find it hard to believe that in early 19th century you could accomplish a real economic blockade in the Caribbean, short of deploying a large naval force at considerable expense and violation of the Monroe doctrine. Plus, even with Haitian ports blockaded, they could still use Dominican Republic as a point of re-export, unless they were occupying it by force at the time.
So, who needs recognition by anybody in such conditions? If you sell sugar for less, there will be plenty of adventurers from America and elsewhere showing up to buy it, the laws and policies be damned. So what’s cheaper, subsidizing sugar exports or paying a huge indemnity to a hostile foreign power for a century?
Mostly to buy international recognition. It wasn’t really in anyone’s interest to see Hati recognized as a country. The UK (the other power player at the time) was happy to see the French lose, but not happy enough to tacitly condone upstart colonies overthrowing their European government. Bad enough that the US had already done it. The same applies to all the other European countries as well.
The US (not a power player yet) was certainly happy to see a European country lose ground in the Americas, but there was no way a country with legalized slavery was going to acknowledge a slave revolt as creating a legitimate government.
And don’t discount racism. Yes, it’s ugly but Africans were indeed seen as inferior. The US may have fought the British, but at least they were all the descendants of Europeans so whites didn’t lose any ground in that fight.
Buying France off gives Hati a way out. They can have one European power recognize them and that’ll lead to the others doing so as well. Mostly because nobody cares much about the land and it’s something they can rub in France’s face. Europe recognizing Hati gets the US to do the same.
France saves face because now the slaves didn’t revolt and chase them off the island. They simply bought out their contracts and the land around them.
While it was probably the only option available to Hati at the time, it certainly created a lot of problems for them.
While racism probably played a part, the more immediate problem was slavery. Every major country in 1806 still supported or had an economy dependent on slavery and the notion that slaves could rebel and establsih a successful new nation was extremely frightening to every leader, parliament, and congress that considered the issue. It was, (from their limited perspectives), essential that Haiti fail as a nation. Racism and chattel slavery of people from Africa are inextricably linked, but the proximate cause was the slavery and not the racism.
This is one reason why Haiti could not simply continue selling its produce (that had made it the “Jewel of the Caribbean” and France’s wealthiest colony) after independence: there was strong and deliberate policy by every major European and North American country to prevent anyone from buying their sugar or any other crops.
And it was the major powers who had the hard currency to really buy the exports at a large scale. Merely embargo-busting and blockade-running is not sufficient to run a viable economy long-term for what was then by far the most densely-populated Caribbean country. Add to that how the war of independence itself caused serious damage to production, so this was all happening precisely during the critical time when they’d need to rebuild. For the first few decades, their immediate neighborhood was embroiled in the South American wars of independence against Spain, so little beyond mutual moral support was to be had there.
One nasty conundrum they faced was that, at the time, to get the sort of big cash-crop commodity production that had created the former wealth, you pretty much would expect to run a plantation-like model (specially if you have ZERO industrial base). Not exactly what you want to tell a population that just rose in arms to get off the plantation, is it…
Also, immediately after independence valuable time was lost and further damage was done in internal strife, and resources were being spent in the occupation of Eastern Hispaniola – a reasonable move, for the sake of national security, but an onerous one anyway – so by the time things sort of “stabilized” enough for someone to sit and negotiate, the situation had badly deteriorated. The rulers finally cried “uncle” to the great powers.
The indemnization, you may imagine, was by no means a popular move in Haiti itself, but it’s not like they got to vote on it. It’s viewed by many as the nail in the coffin of Haiti’s post-independence recovery. With the whole country mortgaged, much of any wealth generated had to be exported, rather than reinvested.
if there was so much damage to the sugar industry and people didn’t want to work there (which certainly is the historically attested case) why was it so darn essential to get the “international recognition”? The more damaged the industry, the less sugar production, the less stuff to “blockade run”. In modern times in places like Iraq they might want to get assistance of foreign engineers in running the oil fields and so forth, but back then, surely the mulatto elite knew how to run a plantation? So what is it that they were gaining from all this recognition beyond the ability of the mulatto rulers to send their kids to France to get an education?
Incidentally, the article on Henri Christophe - Wikipedia (died in 1820, before the indemnity was negotiated) explicitly mentions his ability to grow the sugar using corvee labor, to sell it to American and British merchants and even to buy new slaves from the white slave traders to increase the labor force.
How many countries had caucasian slaves?
The Roman empire and the Ottoman empire to name two. I have heard but not confirmed that the word “slave” comes from Slav from the Ottoman practice of enslaving people from the Balkans.
I think what Tomndebb is saying is that slavery was needed to make large-scale farming economically viable and that racism provided the moral justification, if you will, for it. These two notions reinforced each other. One of the main reasons that the Europeans went to Africa for their slaves is that they had lots of prisoners of war for sale and most of the conveniently located native Americans died from disease and other causes.
IIRC, the first slave in America was white. Or, at least, one of the first ones was, and there’s always some kind of debate about firsts of anything.
Something like an indentured servant, wno ran away from his master, was sentenced to lifetime servitude. Massachusetts?
I think that the black slave thing came up later.
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Remember we’re talking about Haiti. By the time there was a Massachussetts there had been American colonies of European Powers for over a century and a quarter, including within territory that is now in the USA; African chattel slavery was well established therein, having been an early arrival, when in the Caribbean basin it turned out the surviving native population could not provide the manpower required.
Slavery on the scale called for by the economic model in the colonies was potentiated by the abundant supply from the African trade. The advances of the Ottomans had Western Europe boxed in, with few weak “heathen” nations handy from which to get slaves w/o a tough fight, or having to rely on indenture which is temporary. When the Western Europeans began exploring the African coast they found a motherlode of supply of potential slaves at a profitable price point w/o the hassle of having to personally go and defeat them, as local rival tribes took care of that part.
Racial and religious justifications converged with high demand from the colonial empires in the Americas to hit black Africans harder than the old-school “captured enemy” slaves. The Europeans at first simply went along with the idea dating to time immemorial that it’s OK to enslave conquered “heathens”. But what did come *later *was the mass-scale slave economy requiring an intensification of the volume of trade to the point Haiti’s population was 85%+ slaves; and the public justification that this was for the slave’s own good and uplift and that there was something intrinsecally different about the African that required this condition to be maintained.
The Barbary Pirates in late 1700s and early 1800s, too, from what I’ve read.