Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild

.> St. Domingue [Haiti] was no ordinary colony. Although hard to imagine when we see the desperately poor Haiti of today, St. Domingue was the undisputed crown jewel of all European colonies anywhere. Such was its mystique that slave merchants in France sent their shirts across the Atlantic to be washed in its mountain brooks, which were said to whiten linen better than European rivers. St. Domingue was more than twice the size of the largest British Caribbean island, Jamaica; its soil was so rich and so well irrigated that its plantations yielded half again as much sugar per acre as the best land in Jamaica. It produced more than 30 percent of the world's sugar and more than half its coffee, not to speak of cotton and other crops. Thousands of slaves were at work clearing mountainside forests for new coffee estates, but the massive erosion this caused would not take its toll until the next century. The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States. St. Domingue's annual production of sugar and other crops was roughly double that of all the British West Indian islands put together. No colony anywhere made so large a profit for its mother country.

Who removed Aristide? by Paul Farmer

.> Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles....
The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

• https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide
  #AdamHochschild on #StDomingue #Haiti's riches and #PaulFarmer on #OdiousDebt and #FrenchDebt #HaitiRestitution
  #HaitiAndJamaica #HaitiAndFrance

#^Paul Farmer · Who removed Aristide?



On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the...

> It was really Toussaint's war. He had to scrounge for supplies, trading coffee and rum to American smugglers for barrels of gunpowder. French republican officials in the colony, despite their speeches about the rights of man and #Toussaint's protestations of loyalty to France, were increasingly uneasy with a black man as the de facto leader of much of the territory. They suspected that he had independence on his mind.
#AdamHochschild in #BuryTheChains #CaribbeanHistory #SlaveRevolt

Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild https://blog.arkadi.one/bury-the-chains-by-adam-hochschild