To understand Haiti's origins is to understand what made “the modern world” modern
Plus: interesting stuff I read/watched/listened to this wk
I knew your story ever since a kid
Developed a crush when I heard what you did
1804 you made my people free
You the reason I feel I can be anything
– Wyclef Jean, Lady Haiti (2017)
The 10th grade history class I teach is called “Modern Global History” and is intended to cover the history of the world since roughly 1750. This is consistent with New York State’s 10th grade Social Studies standards, but because I teach at an independent school, I don’t have to worry about preparing students for the annual Regents Exam. That means I have lots of latitude in how I approach the amorphous topic of “Modern Global History” – which could technically include anything and everything that’s happened around the world since the mid-18th century.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to approach “Modern Global History” in a way that’s meaningful to 15 and 16 year-olds, and that also avoids falling into the trap of Eurocentrism.
The word “modernity” tends to conjure up positive associations – visions of progress, enlightenment, improved standards of living. But in addition to wondrous innovations and scientific marvels, the modern world has also delivered us cataclysmic climate change; an unchecked pandemic being kept alive by ignorance, greed and political opportunism; a destructive social media ecosystem; and so on.
My argument is that there are four distinct but interconnected forces that distinguish “modern” from “pre-modern” history. We can assign them the acronym CIGI:
CAPITALISM
INDUSTRIALISM
GLOBALIZATION, and
IMPERIALISM
(I admit that I have ordered these terms around the construction of a user-friendly acronym, NOT for reasons of chronology, causation, significance, etc.)
As I neared the end of my first year teaching this past Spring, I started thinking about using Haiti as a sort of touchstone: to introduce the notion of modern history (and its defining “CIGI” features) through the lens of Haiti’s origins, and to revisit that touchstone throughout the year as we made our way to the 21st century. Now that the summer has produced another wave of tragic developments involving the long-beleaguered island nation, it feels like a no-brainer to proceed with this experiment in the upcoming school year.
Why seize upon the history of a sliver of a Caribbean island smaller than the state of Maryland to help tell the story of the entire world over the last ~300 years? (Indeed, Haiti comprises only part of the isle on which it’s located; its much larger neighbor is the present-day Dominican Republic. As you’d imagine, the histories of Haiti and the DR are intimately linked).
In his four-part HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes1 (more to come on that in future posts), Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck asserts – credibly, I think – that “[t]here are three words that summarize the whole history of humanity: civilization, colonization, extermination.” Haiti’s past serves as a micro-history of that larger story, and it is in fact full of strange Absurdities.
To be fair, when I begin my Modern Global History course, we start with a bit of a prologue on what we call Early Modern History, covering important developments from the 1400s-1700s that set the stage for what would follow. Among the most critical developments in that period were the Spanish-backed transatlantic voyages of Christopher Columbus and the broader European Age of Exploration into which it fit. This was the turning point that would usher in the modern forces of “CIGI.”
Columbus first reached land in some part of the Bahamas and then Cuba before arriving in present-day Haiti and the DR. He dubbed it La Isla Española – “the Spanish island,” and before long it was referred to as “Hispaniola.” It would become Spain’s first “New World” colony.
But it’s been generally acknowledged for some time that it’s very wrong to refer to Columbus’s “Discovery of the Americas”: there were at least tens of millions of people already living in what Europeans came to refer to as the “New World” at the time it was “discovered!” There’s been a long debate over the size of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas, but a reasonable, recent estimate puts it at about “60 million in 1492. For comparison, Europe’s population at the time was 70 to 88 million spread over less than half the area.”
In the hundred or so years following the arrival of the first Europeans, the indigenous population of the Americas declined by something like 90 PERCENT, driven most significantly by the spread of disease.
It’s important to focus on this point not only to grapple with the horror of it, but also to realize that Haiti’s story begins not with Columbus’s arrival, but with the indigenous societies that peopled it before he arrived, with genocide following close behind. We refer to the peoples who inhabited Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean at that time as the Taino. It was the Taino who came up with the name ‘Ayiti’ – “land of the mountains” – for their island territory.
We don’t know much about their lifestyle (although there is a museum located in Haiti that has been able to preserve a range of artifacts that give some insight). What we do know is that they were very quickly wiped out. The historian Laurent Dubois notes that “[b]y 1514” – 22 years after Columbus’s arrival on the island – “of a population estimated to have been between 500,000 and 750,000 in 1492, only 29,000 were left. By the mid-sixteenth century the indigenous population of the island had all but vanished.”
Dubois describes Hispaniola as “the ground zero of European colonialism in the Americas.” All that would follow – from the conquests of the Aztecs and Inca to the Trail of Tears – had its roots in the liquidation of the Taino of Ayiti.
This was also ground zero for what would become the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It was Columbus himself who first saw the potential for great profit to be made from mass enslavement in the Americas, at first with export to Europe in mind. In his new book The Verge, Patrick Wyman writes:
An expedition into the heart of Hispaniola in 1495 left thousands of the island’s natives dead. Many more were captured to be taken back to Spain and sold into slavery. The idea of human beings as walking profit and labor centers already had a long history in the emerging Atlantic world. It had an even longer history in Genoa itself, one of the few places where slavery was standard practice in late medieval Europe. Columbus had been raised in Genoa and the Atlantic, and given this background, it was not a leap for him to discuss the possibilities of slaving as an economic model: In a 1498 letter to [Spanish monarchs and his patrons] Ferdinand and Isabella, for example, he judged that perhaps four thousand people could be sold in Seville…. This easy recourse to slavery as a means of generating returns in an otherwise unprofitable venture would lay a tragic foundation for the future.”
It wouldn’t take long for the Spanish colonizers of the Americas to enslave and exploit indigenous peoples in the Americas themselves. According to historian Linford Fisher, “[b]etween 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas in addition to 12.5 million African slaves.” The enslavement of indigenous people, in retrospect, was a sort of ‘pilot program’ that preceded the large-scale Transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans. David Brion Davis has more to say on the factors involved in the shift from indigenous to African slavery in the Americas, but the key point is that European colonization & imperialism gave birth to twins: genocide and chattel slavery.
A succession of Spanish conquistadors followed Columbus to the Americas, and the center of exploitative gravity soon shifted west to places where precious metals could be mined, such as Bolivia, home to the silver-rich so-called “Mountain That Eats Men.” The Portuguese, too, established themselves in present-day Brazil, a colony that would become totally dependent upon slave labor. Over the course of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, “[w]ell over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America.”
The Iberian empires’ new focus on the South American continent and Mexico ultimately created an opening for the British and French in the Caribbean: by 1627, the British had established its colony at Barbados, while the French founded Martinique in 1635. Soon, the French had also muscled their way onto Hispaniola, and established the official colony of Saint-Domingue in present-day Haiti in 1697. Barbados, Martinique, Saint-Domingue, and others – they all ran on plantation systems, similar to the ones that took hold in the exact same period in the colonial American South, all fueled by the labor of enslaved Africans.
The key crops grown on Saint-Domingue’s earliest plantations were tobacco and then indigo, but it was ultimately sugar that made Saint-Domingue “the most lucrative colony on Earth.”What had emerged was the system we now refer to as the “Triangular Trade,” a term made self-explanatory by the map below. This was the embryonic stage of GLOBALIZATION.
The brutality of the conditions endured by the enslaved on Saint-Domingue’s sugar plantations cannot be overstated. They were perhaps most powerfully and horrifyingly captured by the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James in his 1938 study, The Black Jacobins. This is a long quote, but it deserves to be absorbed in full:
The slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they received their food. It was the incentive to work and the guardian of discipline. But there was no ingenuity that fear or a depraved imagination could devise which was not employed to break their spirit and satisfy the lusts and resentment of their owners and guardians – irons on the hands and feet, blocks of wood that the slaves had to drag behind them wherever they went, the tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slaves eating the sugar-cane, the iron collar.
Whipping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the victim; salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears, and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense.
Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling sugar cane over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up to the neck and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them; fastened them near the nests of ants or wasps; made them eat their own excrement, drink their urine, and lick the saliva of other slaves. One colonist was known in moments of anger to throw himself on his slaves and stick his teeth into their flesh.
Some stats help explain further:
The enslaved were literally worked to death: “The nearly 900,000 captive Africans forcibly transported to [Saint-Domingue] lived an average of only three years afterward, while the life expectancy for those born in the colony was only fifteen years.”
As a result, to put it crudely, the “labor supply” constantly had to be replenished; something like 40,000 enslaved people would have been “imported” each year
The enslaved worked 16-20 hours a day on the sugar plantations
“In the 1780s, Haiti exported… 40% of all the sugar consumed in Europe”
This barbaric system was intimately connected to the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION and resulting industrial CAPITALIST system, ticking off our final two “CIGI” boxes. The Industrial Revolution – the shift, starting in England in the 1700s, to the factory system of mass production following the accidental discovery of steam power – was financed by the profits that European PUbEs (Privileged Uber-Elites) reaped from the slave trade and plantation economy of the colonial Americas. It is the Industrial Revolution that we have to thank for catastrophic, man-made climate change.
The interconnectedness of the forces of “CIGI” is powerfully demonstrated by the fact that the wretches employed in the new, miserable industrial factories in England soon turned to tea (imported from China) sweetened by sugar produced on the Caribbean plantations in order to get by: “It gave workers a hit of caffeine to get through a long slog of a day, it provided plentiful calories, and it offered the comfort of warmth during a meal that otherwise often consisted only of bread.”
But back to the story of Saint-Domingue: The enslaved employed resistance strategies from the start; they would have ranged from faking injuries and breaking tools to arson. As in other parts of the Americas, some were able to flee plantations and establish independent safe havens (a phenomenon referred to as marronage).
But it was in 1791 that a large-scale uprising erupted. August 23rd, in fact, marked the 230th anniversary of the start of what would become the world’s only successful slave revolt.
The story of the Haitian Revolution is complicated. In short, in the late 1700s, revolutionary ideas about things like liberty and equality circulated throughout the Atlantic world, hence the American and French Revolutions. Indeed, Haiti’s revolution unfolded roughly in parallel with France’s own. The first stirrings of revolution in Saint-Domingue came not from the enslaved but from the so-called “colored” class of mixed race people who pointed to the French Revolution’s Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen to demand equal footing with Saint-Domingue’s white ruling class, which made up about 8% of the population but possessed almost all of its wealth.
That broader context aside, the Haitian Revolution turned into a massive slave revolt ultimately led by a man known as Toussaint Louverture, sometimes condescendingly referred to as the “Black George Washington.” Lauren Collins does a good job of summing up the course of events in the New Yorker:
Louverture was born enslaved on a sugar plantation on Saint-Domingue…. sometime in the early seventeen-forties. He was emancipated in adulthood and, at about fifty, led the most important slave revolt in history, effectively forcing France to abolish slavery, in 1794. Next, he united the island’s Black and mixed-race populations under his military command; outmaneuvered three successive French commissioners; defeated the British; overpowered the Spanish; and, in 1801—despite having been wounded seventeen times in battle and having lost most of his front teeth to a cannonball explosion—authored a new abolitionist constitution for Saint-Domingue, asserting that “here, all men are born, live, and die free and French.”
Napoleon Bonaparte first sent twenty thousand men to overthrow him, reinstating slavery in the French colonies, in 1802. Louverture instructed [his lieutenant] Jean-Jacques Dessalines to torch the capital city, “so that those who come to re-enslave us always have before their eyes the image of hell they deserve.” Ultimately taken captive, Louverture was deported to France and died within months in a prison in the Jura Mountains. In 1803, Bonaparte’s army was defeated [by the remaining revolutionaries], having lost more soldiers (his brother-in-law among them) on Saint-Domingue than he would, twelve years later, at Waterloo. The next year, the revolutionaries established a new, independent, and free nation: Haiti, the world’s first Black republic.
The successful revolutionaries named their new republic Haiti: a derivation of “‘Ayiti” in a tip of the hat to the Taino who had been exterminated upon Spanish colonization.
The Haitian musician Wyclef Jean’s reference to the year 1804 in the song quoted at the top of this post is, of course, a reference to the year in which Haiti won its independence. As Jean’s song alludes, the Revolution can be remembered as an inspirational, unprecedented, liberating turn of events. But it was also ultimately a tragedy. For about two decades following the Revolution, France refused to recognize its independence. In 1825, King Charles X changed course, as explained by UConn’s Thomas Craemer:
[Charles] decreed that he would recognize independence, but at a cost. The price tag would be 150 million francs – more than 10 years of the Haitian government’s entire revenue. The money, the French said, was needed to compensate former slave owners for the loss of what was deemed their property…. The payments ran for a total of 122 years from 1825 to 1947, with the money going to more than 7,900 former slave owners and their descendants in France.
File under strange Absurdities: it turns out there IS precedence for reparations related to slavery – but to the benefit of slaveholders and their descendents at the expense of the once-enslaved and their descendents!
Economic and political problems and natural disasters have plagued Haiti ever since independence. Just a few lowlights:
Once the most profitable colony in the world, Haiti is now “considered the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere,” thanks to the ruinous burden of reparations
The assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse on last month was totally consistent with the country’s volatile political history since independence. As Jack Dickens notes, “Of the sixty or so leaders – including presidents, military dictators, and emperors – who ruled Haiti between 1805 and 2005, thirty have been assassinated, overthrown, or otherwise died in mysterious circumstances”
The United States has actively and violently contributed to this turmoil. Perhaps most notably: “The United States occupied and ruled Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934, often using violence to suppress Haitians who opposed foreign occupation. In one skirmish, alone, the U.S. military killed over 2,000 Haitian protesters.”
But that wasn’t the end of U.S. involvement in Haitian politics:
“Between 1946 and 1950, under the presidency of Dumarsais Estimé, Haiti enjoyed political and social stability. However, on May 10, 1950, Paul-Eugène Magloire, trained during the U.S. occupation, overthrew Estimé and changed Haiti’s political trajectory.
Magloire established a corrupt political regime. Then the army provided support for U.S.-backed François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, from his presidential election in 1957 to the establishment in 1959 of his dictatorship.
In 1959, Duvalier created the Tontons Macoutes, a paramilitary group trained by U.S. Marines that killed more than 60,000 Haitians. The Duvalier regime, led by Papa Doc’s son Jean-Claude after his death in 1971, lasted until 1986.”
Just weeks ago, Haiti was struck by an earthquake that has killed at least 2,200 people. Because Haiti “sits on a fault line between huge tectonic plates,” earthquakes there are quite common and catastrophic. 220,000 people died in a particularly cataclysmic one in 2010
CAPITALISM, INDUSTRIALISM, GLOBALIZATION, IMPERIALISM. These are the things that distinguish the modern world from what came before, and the stirrings of all four are integral to the story of what had been Ayiti and then became Saint-Domingue and finally Haiti.
I’ve gone on way too long here, but will write more at some point on the significance of the Haitian Revolution to American history, including: the fact that the Louisiana Purchase (and hence the expansion of the United States west of the Mississippi) was a direct result of the Haitian Rev and that the Haitian Rev inspired a number of slave revolts in the U.S. in the run-up to the Civil War.
Stuff I read, watched, and listened to this week:
There are lots and lots of terrible hot takes on Afghanistan clogging up the interwebs, but here are a couple of things I found insightful and informative.
Buzzfeed’s Afghan War, By The Numbers looks at the staggering toll of the country’s 20-year adventure in Afghistan. The total price tag stands at about $2.26 trillion dollars. “For comparison, it would take $1.7 trillion to pay of all outstanding US student loans.” It’s also 12 times Jeff Bezos’s net worth. Lots of other eye-popping numbers in the piece.
Robert Wright’s “How the Afghanistan War really started” looks at the Cold War mindset that gave birth to the long-standing crisis in Afghanistan and warns about the broader implications of a seeming return of a Cold War mindset in U.S. foreign policy. One of the punchlines: it was American intervention in Afghanistan beginning around 1980 that helped give rise to both Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place.
In the New Republic, Jonathan Katz argues that “[b]oth Haiti and Afghanistan owe their sorry conditions to decades of direct U.S. control.”
Reflections on the very challenging task of living in 2021:
Neurologist Oliver Sacks actually wrote this piece in the mid-2010s, but it was circulating on Twitter this week. Sacks was dying of cancer as he wrote it, and meditates on the corrosive nature of the isolating, tech-obsessed, social media era we’re living through. But he ends with an optimistic note and something of a call to action:
“[I]t seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass…. Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead. As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour.”
Cassady Rosenblum quit her job as an NPR producer during the pandemic and moved back home with family in West Virginia and wrote about it in a piece titled “Work is a False Idol.”
“Here in the hills, the new silence of my days, deepened by the solitude of the pandemic, has allowed me to observe the state of our planet in the year 2021 — and it looks to be on fire, as our oligarchs take to space. From my view down here on the carpet, I see a system that, even if it bounces back to “normal,” I have no interest in rejoining, a system that is beginning to come undone.”
Not unrelated to work as a false idol: I am listening to the Audible version of The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. It’s not only a gripping portrait of Neumann, but a searing indictment of the “Great Startup Delusion” and the various powerful institutions and people (PUbEs!) implicated in it
Finally, some columnist at the Washington Post wrote a terrible column – since corrected – in which he “incorrectly stated that Indian cuisine is based on one spice, curry, and that Indian food is made up only of curries, types of stew.” Padma Lakshmi wrote a fantastic response a few days later, among other things explaining the history of IMPERIALISM and curry. (“CIGI” is everywhere around us)
For more on the rich history of Indian cuisine and the problematic nature of “curry,” I recommend an episode of a highly underrated show called Ugly Delicious, hosted by celebrity chef David Chang and available on Netflix