The indelible toll

May 24, 2022 9:04 AM

After the modern world's first successful slave rebellion established the nation of Haiti, reparations were paid - to their former enslavers. "The price tag was huge. In 1803, France sold Louisiana to the United States for 80 million francs — just over half what it demanded from Haiti. And back then, Louisiana encompassed a large sweep of the continent, stretching across all or parts of 15 modern states. Haiti was 1/77 the size. The Haitian government didn’t have enough money to pay even the first of five installments" Where would Haiti be if they hadn't been forced to pay? Estimates of the economic loss vary and has been calculated by some to be up to $115 billion.

The Root of Haiti's Misery - Ransom to Enslavers.
How a French bank captured Haiti
The Wall St-inspired US invasion of 1914/15.

posted by storybored (24 comments total)

History is written by the winners.
posted by Melismata at 9:28 AM on May 24, 2022

Jennifer L. Anderson's book "Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America" touches on this. France's sanctions were clearly designed to make any other colony think twice about any move to help enslaved people. France strongly dissuaded the fledgling USA (and anyone else) from trading with Haiti, and so Haitian people starved.
posted by scruss at 9:34 AM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

France is still actively keeping its former African colonies poor through dodgy bank practices, fees, debt, and financial entanglements they created when they physically left their colonies.
posted by chaz at 9:51 AM on May 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

This article may be important in bringing this information to a wider audience. That said, the historians on my Twitter feed are pretty unhappy about how the article Columbuses all over their work. Here's Paul Cohen's thread about it.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:52 AM on May 24, 2022 [32 favorites]

The last payment on the reparations bond was made in 1947.

It was financed with sugar exports, and if you ever wonder how Haiti got to look so denuded and desertified[0], it's because they farmed the hell out of the land to get the sugar.

[0] satellite imagery shows forest cover is increasing over Haiti nowadays.
posted by ocschwar at 9:54 AM on May 24, 2022 [10 favorites]

I haven’t followed it closely, but there’s been a bit of academic blow back about these articles - not over the content, but over the framing that the NYT uncovered a story that had never been told before. If people want to go beyond these good explainers, they should know that there is research out there for them.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:07 AM on May 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

I learned about this reading Piketty's Capital and Ideology. After reading the glorious "We freed the slaves!" chapter in the history books, you need to then read the next several chapters to find out how it was all a lie. Enslavement as property ownership easily shifts to economic enslavement.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:07 AM on May 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

Ah, I see Jpfed beat me to the punch, and better.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:09 AM on May 24, 2022

France is rich. They could pay Haiti this money back. Instalments would be one way, or by issuing bonds.
posted by plonkee at 10:27 AM on May 24, 2022 [10 favorites]

In the UK, the only way to get enough Parliamentary votes to abolish slavery completely was to pay the enslavers off. British taxpayers (including many descendants of those enslaved) finished paying off the loan that required in 2015. It was the pragmatic choice to make in 1833, and at least we all paid it, but it's still shitty.
posted by plonkee at 10:32 AM on May 24, 2022 [10 favorites]

I learned the broad outlines of this in my early 20s some 30 plus years ago, from where I do not know. Every once in a while I mention the fact of this "debt" and its consequences to acquaintances and a good chunk of the time I am met with disbelief or skepticism.
posted by Pembquist at 11:12 AM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

Pembquist, I too learned about this many years ago and am also met with skepticism whenever I've mentioned it to others. People hate being reminded that the reason the West (i.e. white people) are so wealthy is because they've literally stolen it from others.
posted by flamk at 1:17 PM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

This is devastating, heartbreaking, I had no idea. It tracks so obviously with the history I do know. Well past my surprise at this sort of multi-generational, multi-century evil, but never past my outrage. Both France and the U.S. need to make the reparations and amends that can be made now, as there is literally nothing else that can be done now to account for the suffering and misery of the millions of people utterly destroyed by this.

And then begin looking for real at reparations for the Africans and Native Americans enslaved and exterminated across the United States. And other peoples treated as possessions throughout American history.

Thank you so much for this information, information we should all have been aware of all along (kudos to the academics and researchers whom have been on the beat all along!).
posted by riverlife at 1:34 PM on May 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

I highly recommend the Revolutions' season on the Haitian Revolution. Mike Duncan tells the story of the revolution, stage by stage, while also drawing out the personal relationships, conflicts, triumphs and failures. He has a great skill at delivering a 40 minute episode that is a clear chunk of information. The only critiques I have are that he doesn't include enough non-podcast content, like maps and photos.
posted by rebent at 1:50 PM on May 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

For those interested in how the original deal was made, I wrote a couple of answers in r/askhistorians a few days ago.
posted by elgilito at 2:56 PM on May 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

Apologies if this is a bit of a derail, I suppose it's somewhat likely someone will flag and it will get deleted, but: one of my biggest gripes, in general, with Metafilter is that far too often one of the first few comments shits on the post, which leads to a whole kerfuffle about whether it's a good post or whatever. (not to pick on anyone, but for example https://www.metafilter.com/195409/How-Its-Made-Pakistan is the last one I went into the comments on, and promptly regretted it)

But in this case, I'd like to congratulate everyone for adding context to the OP without denigrating it. More of this, please.
posted by booooooze at 4:37 PM on May 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

I strongly recommend reading C L R James' work The Black Jacobins. An opinionated, wonderfully written history of the Haitian revolution from a Carribbean Marxist scholar and an absolute classic. The PDF is easily located online. The evil of the local whites, the hypocrisy of France and Britain and the US, the bravery and ability of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the slave revolutionaries are all laid out in lucid detail.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:40 PM on May 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

A criticism of oversimplification and claims of causality in these articles: The New York Times is Wrong About Haiti.

I don't feel like I have any basis to evaluate the author's claims versus the NYT's claims here, but I do think it's interesting to consider how this kind of article is presented in The Times versus other news and how the standards seem to be quite different when it comes to making claims of causality.
posted by ssg at 9:55 PM on May 24, 2022

A good side-read is Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton. The book is a bit dense, but you can skim the data-heavy sections. It makes clear just how significant cotton was in the entire global economy, and how much it depended on slavery and colonialism.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:24 PM on May 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Haiti has been used and abused by so many other wealthy nations. Most Dominicans will have nothing to do with the Haitians. They have suffered for so very long and continue to suffer to this day. Some years ago a captain of a ship said that he used to leave his lights on at night so the children could study on the docks. He had been all over the world and stated that the Haitian people were the strongest that he had met.
You can hear that strength in their music. I was fortunate to meet some Haitians in NYC and Miami whilst DJ'ing there in the 1990's. I hope that someday they will get the respect and help that they deserve.
posted by DJZouke at 6:16 AM on May 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

It's totally valuable to bring this information to a wider audience; I do just wish the Times hadn't presented it as though they were uncovering radical new information about something that was already coming into focus when I was in grad school, now more than one decade ago.

The involvement of finance in perpetuating slavery and its economic aftereffects is often overlooked. There's a good section on slave-backed bonds in The Half Has Never Been Told.
posted by praemunire at 8:35 AM on May 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

From what I gather, in a very limited way, is that some accomplished scholars who have written about Haiti are not pleased about how the NY Times co-opted their work and did not give them proper credit for their publications.
posted by DJZouke at 12:32 PM on May 25, 2022

I wrote a paper on the Haitian Revolution for a history class about 20 years ago. The previously mentioned The Black Jacobins was one of the main sources.

If memory serves (IMS), the French Jacobins were one of the few factions during that time to support the slave rebellion. I don't remember anything about the French pressuring the US not to trade with Haiti, but do remember (IMS) reading that Jefferson was vehemently against the new republic.

How long must the footsteps of freedom be tombstones and ridiculously long-term debts?
posted by house-goblin at 3:24 PM on May 26, 2022

The various NYT authors argue that, while they aren't the first to uncover this well-established history, they are the first to tabulate it fully:

No detailed accounting of how much the Haitians actually paid has ever been done, historians say... The New York Times spent months sifting through thousands of pages of original government documents, some of them centuries old and rarely, if ever, reviewed by historians. We scoured libraries and archives in Haiti, France and the United States to study the double debt and its effect on Haiti, financially and politically.

In what leading historians say is a first, we tabulated how much money Haitians paid to the families of their former masters and to the French banks and investors who held that first loan to Haiti, not just in official government payments on the double debt but also in interest and late fees, year after year, for decades.

We found that Haitians paid about $560 million in today’s dollars. But that doesn’t nearly capture the true loss. If that money had simply stayed in the Haitian economy and grown at the nation’s actual pace over the last two centuries — rather than being shipped off to France, without any goods or services being provided in return — it would have added a staggering $21 billion to Haiti over time, even accounting for its notorious corruption and waste...

We shared our findings and analysis with 15 leading economists and financial historians who study developing economies and how public debt affects their growth. All but one either agreed with our $21 billion estimate, said it was squarely within the range of possibilities, or considered it conservative.

So it's amusing that later in that article -- the main write-up of their project, which appeared in the print edition -- they mention almost passing and somewhat condescendingly:

In 2003, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest who became the first democratically elected president after decades of dictatorship, launched a campaign demanding that France repay the money it had extracted, with television ads, street banners and a legal team putting together the elements of an international lawsuit...

A month later, the French government helped [the US] remove Mr. Aristide from power, saying it was trying to prevent Haiti, which was heaving with turmoil, from spinning into civil war. But while French officials have long said the restitution claim was not the reason for Mr. Aristide’s ouster, Mr. Burkard acknowledged it was “probably a bit about that, too.”...

Mr. Aristide had been ousted before, in a military coup in 1991, less than a year after winning the first democratic election since the dictatorship. But he was re-elected nine years later and launched his restitution campaign in 2003, on the 200th anniversary of Toussaint Louverture’s death.

With the money Haiti shipped to France for the so-called independence debt back in hand, he said, his country could invest in all the things it had never been able to afford, including schools, hospitals, roads, tractors and water for peasants.

Tallying Haiti’s losses, he presented a bill: $21,685,135,571.48.

posted by chortly at 5:56 PM on May 26, 2022 [2 favorites]