HAITI

Haiti has the paradoxical history of having gone from being, in 1789, the most profitable colony in the Americas to suffering, in the early twenty-first century, as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. To understand how and why this has come to pass it is necessary to understand the central role Haiti—in its prior existence as the French colony of Saint Domingue—played in the broader history of the French Empire and the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. And it is necessary to understand the forces that during the nineteenth century sapped the radical possibilities augured in by Haitian independence in 1804. The complicated economic, political, and social history of Haiti's struggles in the nineteenth century help explain the devastating conflicts that wracked the country during a twentieth century in which its history was dominated by the actions of the United States.

from european settlement to independence

In 1492 Christopher Columbus created the first European settlement in the Americas on the north coast of Española, the island that is today divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic (and that is known as Hispaniola in the Anglophone world). The Spanish were the first to settle, and they introduced both slavery and sugar plantations to their colony of Santo Domingo. The Spanish, however, focused most of their energy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the colonization of mainland Latin America, and they abandoned the western portion of Española, which was eventually settled, at first illegally and then, after 1697, with Spanish approval, by the French. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Saint Domingue moved from the margins of the colonial system to its very center, and became the richest colony in the area through an economy based on the production of sugar and coffee for export to Europe.

The economy depended on the brutal exploitation of nearly half a million slaves, who died so quickly that they had to be replaced by constant arrivals from Africa. By 1789, approximately two-thirds of the enslaved people on the island—who made up 90 percent of the population—had been born in Africa. From this enslaved population there emerged, in 1791, a brilliantly organized uprising that overwhelmed the planters and established itself as a military and political force to be reckoned with. By 1793 the French administrators had decreed the abolition of slavery in the colony in a bid to win the insurgents to their side in the midst of an imperial war against Britain and Spain. The decision was ratified in 1794 in Paris, and during the next eight years a complicated and conflictual process of emancipation was instituted on the island. While the governors of the colony, at first French administrators and then local leaders such as Toussaint-Louverture, remained committed to a plantation economy, most of the former slaves had other ideas. They sought the autonomy of land ownership, and pursued social mobility through military service and in the colony's towns. Administrators responded with often draconian laws seeking to compel workers to stay on plantations, where, though they were paid a small amount for their labor, their opportunities were of course quite limited.

Despite the limits placed on their freedom, the former slaves were haunted by the idea that they might be returned to slavery. In the early 1800s, shortly after coming to power in France, Napoleon Bonaparte took a series of decisions that led to a disastrous and brutal war in Saint Domingue. Seeking to reassert metropolitan control over the boldly autonomous regime of Toussaint, he also allowed his colonial policies to be shaped by the advice of colonial planters who argued for a containment and ultimately a reversal of emancipation. By the middle of 1802 it had become clear to the people of Saint Domingue that France intended to return them to slavery. Although Tous-saint had surrendered and then been deported off the island, and his major generals had also gone over to the French side, small groups of insurgents, often led by African-born leaders, fought a war they understood quite literally as one of "liberty or death." In time, the insurrection grew, swelled by defections from the French side, and by 1803 it was clear that France, despite a massive commitment of troops to the colony, was facing a huge military loss. They withdrew in late 1803 and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general then leading the insurrection, declared the birth of a new nation called Haiti on 1 January 1804. The name of the nation was derived from the original indigenous name that had been erased by Columbus. The choice was rich with symbolism: Haiti was meant to be a response not just to the brutality and inequality of slavery but also to the larger history of European colonization and oppression in the Americas.

the challenges of independence

The challenges faced by the people of Haiti after independence were enormous. The colony had been constructed entirely to serve the economic needs of France for sugar and coffee. Its environment had already been devastated by the late eighteenth century—commentators at the time already complained of the problems of deforestation—and the colony had been artificially populated through a slave trade aimed at sustaining a highly industrialized plantation system. The economic niches that were available to Haiti—the production of sugar and coffee—depended on a labor system that, under-standably enough, was anathema to many former slaves. Instead, they successfully created a world that was the antithesis of the plantation by taking ownership of small plots of land and producing for themselves and for local markets. Out of slavery was born a culture of independence and subsistence in which the religious practices that came to be known as Vodou took root and thrived.

In the early nineteenth century, Haiti was relatively isolated from the European empires that had once dominated its political life. Although Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. president, set a policy of isolation, refusing to extend recognition to the new nation, trade continued with the United States. The new nation's leaders, meanwhile, cultivated connections with other parts of the Americas, notably when Alexandre Pétion welcomed a beleaguered Simon Bolívar to take refuge in Haiti. Relations with France, meanwhile, were unsurprisingly strained. France also refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the new state, a refusal that essentially blocked recognition by any of the other European powers. Planters hoping to recover their fortune regularly put forth plans for reconquest. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, a series of negotiations took place between France and Haiti. For the Haitian leadership, gaining French acknowledgment of their independence was crucial, because other European powers would not openly trade with Haiti until France had officially accepted the new nation. Haiti successfully rebuffed some of France's more absurd attempts to actually regain control of the colony. But, under President Jean-Pierre Boyer, the Haitian government eventually agreed to an 1825 deal by which their old colonizers would acknowledge their existence as a sovereign state and reopen diplomatic and trade negotiations.

The cost, however, was quite steep: Haiti agreed to pay 150 million francs (later reduced to 60 million), which was to be distributed to planters as an indemnity for the losses they had suffered during the revolution. It was, in a sense, a fine for Haiti's successful revolution, paid to the individuals who had overseen and profited from the brutal system of slavery in the colony. And it had far-reaching effects. Haiti took out loans from French banks and began a process of paying them off, one that lasted into the twentieth century. Haiti did have economic successes during this period: over the course of the nineteenth century, elites successfully sustained and expanded the nation's coffee economy. But the possibilities for reinvestment of the money made through the export of coffee were undermined, in part by the heavy taxation that was necessary to pay off the debt to France. The profits of the rural population were also diminished by practices of local merchants in Haiti's ports who used their near-monopoly on exports to their advantage. There were also ongoing political conflicts in the country, some of which pitted peasant movements seeking a greater say in the nation's governance against often-authoritarian rulers based in Port-au-Prince. Haiti's nineteenth century, however, was more complicated than is usually acknowledged, and included periods of relative political stability and economic growth alongside periods of instability.

Haiti's elite, meanwhile, continued to confront an extremely hostile world. In an era of rising "scientific" racism and imperialism, the presence of a proud and independent nation founded by slave revolution was a major challenge to the reigning order. While African Americans and abolitionists wrote admiringly of Haiti's history, deeply racist portrayals of Haiti and its people dominated in the United States and Europe. The vision of Haiti as a backward and barbaric nation populated by poor, superstitious people helped justify the 1915 occupation of the island by the United States, which was to have dramatic consequences on the twentieth-century history of the nation. In many ways, more than two hundred years after gaining independence from France, and more than seventy years after the "Second Independence" that came with U.S. withdrawal in 1934, Haiti is still seeking a true and fruitful independence on its own terms.

See alsoCaribbean; Colonialism; French Revolution; Napoleon; Toussaint Louverture.

bibliography

Ardouin, Beaubrun. Études sur l'histoire d'Haïti suivies de la vie du général J.-M. Borgella. 1853–1865. 11 vols. Reprint, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1958.

Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, Mass., 2004.

Gaillard, Gusti-Klara. L'expérience haïtienne de la dette extérieure; ou, Une production caféière pillée, 1875–1915. Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1990.

Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti. Cambridge, U.K., 1979.

Sheller, Mimi. Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. Gainesville, Fla., 2000.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Haiti, State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York, 1990.

Laurent Dubois