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This is kind of ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that Haiti was born from a successful slave revolt and and one of the first things it did as an ind

This is kind of ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that Haiti was born from a successful slave revolt and and one of the first things it did as an independent country was to expel or kill virtually all the whites, expropriate their property and destroy all the institutions associated with them. Both culturally and genetically (95.5% per Wikipedia), Haiti thus has a lot in common with sub-Saharan Africa, another notably poor part of the world, while the DR largely inherited the culture of their Spanish conquerors and rulers and genetics of both the Spanish and the indigenous inhabitants (well over half the country are mixed native/white, only 15%-ish black). Connecting the dots from this to their present sad state of affairs is obviously pretty controversial, but I need to note that aside from the obvious racist inferences, there are also many indirect paths. For example, Haiti being both linguistically and culturally "the odd one out" in the neighborhood, they lack an obvious pool of culturally related investors to tap into, face racism from non-Haitians (relations between Haiti and DR in particular are very bad) and struggle to attract investment from the outside.

simonh 5y ago
>...expel or kill virtually all the whites, expropriate their property and destroy all the institutions associated with them. You could have written that about Zimbabwe and it would be just as relevant. There are also a lot of people in SA who are trying to go the same route as fast as they can. I fully understand the anger and resentment these people feel towards ethnic Europeans, but revenge never comes without it's own price.
- kewrkewm53 5y ago
  Yeah, history shows that revolutions which consist killing or expelling all the educated, well-off citizen typically end up having pretty bad results for everybody. Even if you successfully capture their wealth, the future will be poor when there's nobody competent enough left to manage administration, education, farms, industry, infrastructure and so on. And once things go downhill like that, it's not easy to turn things around. I also think there's a cultural factor at play. In addition to wealth and education, more well-off families may also have cultural capital which encourages things like entrepreneurship, long-term thinking and higher self-esteem. Even if these are secondary to wealth, they may still have an impact. I think the impact of culture in general is underestimated as it very much influences human behaviour and outcomes, not just politics, geography etc.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    It's fairly easy to take the racial pieces out of this and talk about it in abstract. What you're losing when you kill / expel the wealthy (whomever they are) and expropriate / redistribute property is cultural investment in institutions. In that people may feel the previous system was unjust, but they nevertheless believed in it. That belief (aka trust) takes generations to build. Revolutions which violently dislocate institutions don't replace them with alternatives: they start from zero. This has profound growth consequences when, for example, it takes four+ decades for people to trust the legal system again. Or banking. Or anything.
    - baud147258 5y ago
      another point I remember being made on the aftermath of successful revolutions was how revolutions tend to select leaders which are ill-suited to rebuild the institutions after they have won
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        To some degree, revolutions feel like the primary / general election distinction. In that the things you have to say and positions you have to hold to inspire people to revolution, are ill suited to post-revolution rebuilding. Which is probably why it's rare: you'd need someone who's self-aware enough to hold both views, talented enough to have both skillsets, and politically astute enough to navigate that pivot with their colleagues and constituents.
  - mc32 5y ago
    This happens in revolutions where race is not an immediate factor such as Venezuela. All the experts leave (including native experts) so the infrastructure which propped up the country slowly deteriorates without anyone being able to fix and maintain things properly and productivity and output go down…
dimitar 5y ago
Well, for 150 years they were similar in per capita income (and everything else really) and they started diverging in the 60s and 70s. And you also have another non-Hispanic country in Jamaica that has taken a different path compared to Haiti in the same period: https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/haiti/jamaica?sc=XE34 https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/haiti/jamaica?s...
- ethbr0 5y ago
  You'd expect per capita income to lag though, right? If a country is investing in modernization (especially, in it's people via education, etc), that's a 30+ year payoff from start. Granted, 150 is a lot, but you'd expect some convergence before divergence. I was looking at generation size and life expectancy per country to tease that out further, and there's a surprising gap between Haiti [0] and the DR [1], going back to 1950, that has persisted. Couldn't find earlier. Both are increasing, but using life expectancy as a proxy for economic power (people spend on it as a priority, etc), Haiti appears to have started from a much lower base. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HTI/haiti/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HTI/haiti/life-expecta... [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DOM/dominican-republic/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DOM/dominican-republic...
ww2buff 5y ago
What exactly do you think is the significance of the “genetic similarity to sub-Saharan Africa” Please be very, very specific
- eivindga 5y ago
  For one, it might be harder to attract investments from Europe or the US? People generally invest and hire people that looks similar to them. It shouldn't be like this, but that's a very common thing to see. -- From Wikipedia: "Race is another defining factor of Dominican–Haitian relations. The ethnic composition of the Dominican population is 73% mixed race, 16% white, and 11% black; while 95% of the Haitian population is black."
- Alternitarius 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A "5.2% of Black men, 0.1% of European men, and 1.3% of Asian men carried the 2R allele" "2R allele of the VNTR region of the gene and an increase in the likelihood of committing serious crime or violence has been found" "the 2R allele and a higher likelihood of violent behavior in adolescents and young adults"
seszett 5y ago
There's another thing that is missing, the article says "Haiti and the D.R. share the same geography" but that is quite wrong, as Haiti was actually the undesirable part of the island, an unexploited part that was opportunistically colonised by France because Spain didn't use it. They don't share the same geography or natural resources at all, most of the settled, economically important places both in Haiti and DR are in the plains but DR has more plains than the whole area of Haiti, while Haiti's few plains are mostly salt marshes with cities in the more hospitable areas.
- dmurray 5y ago
  The article claims the opposite: > Haiti [...] is steadily losing arable land. But it still has more arable land than the entire Dominican Republic, despite being only about half as large in terms of territory! So the D.R. actually had — and has — less opportunity to farm. Seems almost the opposite of your argument, if we substitute "plains that are not salt marshes" for "arable land". I don't know which is true or whether you're actually measuring something substantially different.
  - seszett 5y ago
    Weird, but Wikipedia does say of the DR that almost 80% of the total land area [is] suitable for crop production and that the main exports are fruits such as avocado, papaya, bananas, cocoa, etc, which don't grow on arable land anyway. In 1998, arable land totaled 1,020,000 hectares; with land under permanent crops at 480,000 hectares.[0] While on Haiti, it says that of the total arable land of 550,000 hectares, 125,000 hectares are suited for irrigation, and of those only 75,000 hectares actually have been improved with irrigation.[1] So while I'm sure Haiti could do better than what they are doing now, it seems curious to say that it is more suited for farming than the Dominican Republic. I think the author might have misread numbers. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Dominican_Republic#Agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Dominican_Repub... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Haiti#Agriculture,_forestry,_and_fishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Haiti#Agriculture,_...
LightG 5y ago
That's the elephant in the room? Ok ...
Scarblac 5y ago
> This is kind of ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that Haiti was born from a successful slave revolt and and one of the first things it did as an independent country was to expel or kill virtually all the whites, expropriate their property and destroy all the institutions associated with them. Both culturally and genetically (95.5% per Wikipedia), Haiti thus has a lot in common with sub-Saharan Africa, So they were a society of uneducated ex-slaves with no institutions. That's likely enough to explain the difference by itself?
mucholove 5y ago
Seconds elephant in the room not mentioned: Haiti was by far the most productive colony in all of the Americas. The French sold territory from Louisiana to the Rocky Mountains just so they could focus their efforts on keeping Haiti. This is to say that the drop in trade was ENORMOUS because no other nation at the time wanted to consider what a successful slave revolt might mean for them. Dominican Republic (and I am Dominican) was a largely abandoned island with no real economic attractions. People fled after one pirate raid. And for a hundred or so years it was largely empty. One minir nit; You are very right in pointing out the animosity between the former slaves and their enslavers. It is importa however to note that the leader of the revolution, Touissant was actually a bit more compassionate than the average Haitian at the time. Moreover, he was much more interested and capable of management than almost everyone else. Everyone else was uneducated and more importantly deprived of basic culture.
heymijo 5y ago
There is LOTS of context missing before we get to the 1804 massacre of the remaining whites in Haiti. Thirteen years of conflict and war took place before this happened. Why? Enslaved people wanted what the French Declaration of the Rights of Man guaranteed, that "all men free and equal." In struggling for this Haitians were bounced around like a football, between the great powers of France, Spain, and Britain. Every attempt at autonomy or freedom was met with outright force or duplicity aimed at returning Haiti to the status quo of one of the most brutal forms of slavery in history. What's the saying? Fool me once... Dessalines, who ordered the 1804 massacre, had seen all of this, topped off by the French just a few years before taking out Toussaint Louverture, who was forgiving of whites. He had also seen brutality the likes of which we cannot imagine the French staged mass executions via firing squads, hanging, and drowning Haitians in bags Rochambeau invented a new means of mass execution, which he called "fumigational-sulphurous baths": killing hundreds of Haitians in the holds of ships by burning sulphur to make sulphur dioxide to gas them. Should you still think the Haitians more brutal than others, do read up on the British and French exploits in continental Europe during the Peninsular Wars. God help you should you find yourself a non-combatant in a place just taken by siege. Haiti was born in brutal slavery. It has been meddled with incessantly throughout its history by greater powers. If we want to trace a line back, those are the dots to look at connecting.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >He had also seen brutality the likes of which we cannot imagine We don't need to imagine because ISIS filmed it in 1080p for us. Of if you want something a little less cultural exotic there's plenty of examples from the Balkans.
- BoiledCabbage 5y ago
  Exactly this. To discuss Toussaint and 1804 and not discuss the French commander Rochambeau is extremely misleading. He brought gas chambers to Haiti via and was systematically massacring blacks. The entire war turned brutal. Haiti knew trade was key as they were the wealthiest colony in the west. Toussaint actually negotiated treaties with John Adams and welcomed American investment and trade deals along with other nations. What happened (and again Haiti perspectives comes in to play of who was writing history and what gets emphasized), was a nation of slave gaining independence and defeating Napoleon in military combat. That absolutely shocked the European powers. They were all slave holding counties and their immediate acts was to stop Haiti from succeeding at all costs. In the US Thomas Jefferson took over, and being a southern pro-plavery president he immediately blocked all trade with Haiti knowing that the colony depended on trade to survive financially. France as well planned to essentially starve the country economically and take it back over later. The entire western powers effectively put the country under embargo. They were deathly afraid it would inspire other slave areas to want freedom (lots of texts written about this) and the way they decided to stop it was to ensure Haiti fails as a country. The fighting in that war for independence was brutal and ugly on all sides. Toussaint was a brilliant leader and likely would've taken the country to success. He beat what were considered to European armies is the time. Final after winning again against the French, they invited him to "parley" and when he came for the discussion they captured him and threw him in a prison where he died. They could not beat him and finally that was his they stopped him. For diplomatic negotiation and the capture. And that was maybe the third back stab by the European powers at the time. He was the father of Haiti, their George Washington. His replacement is the one who never forgave that and who militarily was against Rochembeau and who was after this betrayal we no longer want any Europeans here. Previously the British betrayed them, said they'd fight with with against France to end slavery. They agreed - allied with the British and then a the hatians they took all the militarily losses and handed territory to the British to be British free colonies the British came in and started enslaving the Haitians again. The period of that time is insanely complex. All of a sudden I've seen the narrative of OP being pushed everywhere. Because it's "easy" and people can think of Zimbabwe as an easy analogy - that's wrong. And frequently people pushing it then turn it into discussions of current US politics. [And that's where I'll stop because I don't want this to start down that trail]. What went on in Haiti is way more complex than that simplistic narrative.
brudgers 5y ago
expropriate their property and destroy all the institutions associated with them An odd phrasing considering that their own bodies were considered their property and slavery was among the institutions. Government was the primary institution and one which the freed slaves did not abolish.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Government and the economy are just people, they're not actually a 'thing'. If you kill off the people who have experience running the economy, government, education system (I know, Haiti's was likely tiny and only for the ruling class and likely consisted of a few private tutors), then there's no one to teach the next generation and you have no government or economy. Instead of killing off the slavers, pressing them into forced restitution as advisors and educators would have been better for Haitians, more satisfying, and just. Why kill the governor who knows not only how to builds roads but where and when they should be built, and instead force him to continue doing his job, only his payment is now a stay of execution?

simonh 5y ago

>...expel or kill virtually all the whites, expropriate their property and destroy all the institutions associated with them. You could have written that about Zimbabwe and it would be just as relevant. There are also a lot of people in SA who are trying to go the same route as fast as they can. I fully understand the anger and resentment these people feel towards ethnic Europeans, but revenge never comes without it's own price.

kewrkewm53 5y ago
Yeah, history shows that revolutions which consist killing or expelling all the educated, well-off citizen typically end up having pretty bad results for everybody. Even if you successfully capture their wealth, the future will be poor when there's nobody competent enough left to manage administration, education, farms, industry, infrastructure and so on. And once things go downhill like that, it's not easy to turn things around. I also think there's a cultural factor at play. In addition to wealth and education, more well-off families may also have cultural capital which encourages things like entrepreneurship, long-term thinking and higher self-esteem. Even if these are secondary to wealth, they may still have an impact. I think the impact of culture in general is underestimated as it very much influences human behaviour and outcomes, not just politics, geography etc.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  It's fairly easy to take the racial pieces out of this and talk about it in abstract. What you're losing when you kill / expel the wealthy (whomever they are) and expropriate / redistribute property is cultural investment in institutions. In that people may feel the previous system was unjust, but they nevertheless believed in it. That belief (aka trust) takes generations to build. Revolutions which violently dislocate institutions don't replace them with alternatives: they start from zero. This has profound growth consequences when, for example, it takes four+ decades for people to trust the legal system again. Or banking. Or anything.
  - baud147258 5y ago
    another point I remember being made on the aftermath of successful revolutions was how revolutions tend to select leaders which are ill-suited to rebuild the institutions after they have won
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      To some degree, revolutions feel like the primary / general election distinction. In that the things you have to say and positions you have to hold to inspire people to revolution, are ill suited to post-revolution rebuilding. Which is probably why it's rare: you'd need someone who's self-aware enough to hold both views, talented enough to have both skillsets, and politically astute enough to navigate that pivot with their colleagues and constituents.
- mc32 5y ago
  This happens in revolutions where race is not an immediate factor such as Venezuela. All the experts leave (including native experts) so the infrastructure which propped up the country slowly deteriorates without anyone being able to fix and maintain things properly and productivity and output go down…

dimitar 5y ago

Well, for 150 years they were similar in per capita income (and everything else really) and they started diverging in the 60s and 70s. And you also have another non-Hispanic country in Jamaica that has taken a different path compared to Haiti in the same period: https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/haiti/jamaica?sc=XE34 https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/haiti/jamaica?s...

ethbr0 5y ago
You'd expect per capita income to lag though, right? If a country is investing in modernization (especially, in it's people via education, etc), that's a 30+ year payoff from start. Granted, 150 is a lot, but you'd expect some convergence before divergence. I was looking at generation size and life expectancy per country to tease that out further, and there's a surprising gap between Haiti [0] and the DR [1], going back to 1950, that has persisted. Couldn't find earlier. Both are increasing, but using life expectancy as a proxy for economic power (people spend on it as a priority, etc), Haiti appears to have started from a much lower base. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HTI/haiti/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HTI/haiti/life-expecta... [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DOM/dominican-republic/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DOM/dominican-republic...

ww2buff 5y ago

What exactly do you think is the significance of the “genetic similarity to sub-Saharan Africa” Please be very, very specific

eivindga 5y ago
For one, it might be harder to attract investments from Europe or the US? People generally invest and hire people that looks similar to them. It shouldn't be like this, but that's a very common thing to see. -- From Wikipedia: "Race is another defining factor of Dominican–Haitian relations. The ethnic composition of the Dominican population is 73% mixed race, 16% white, and 11% black; while 95% of the Haitian population is black."
Alternitarius 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A "5.2% of Black men, 0.1% of European men, and 1.3% of Asian men carried the 2R allele" "2R allele of the VNTR region of the gene and an increase in the likelihood of committing serious crime or violence has been found" "the 2R allele and a higher likelihood of violent behavior in adolescents and young adults"

seszett 5y ago

There's another thing that is missing, the article says "Haiti and the D.R. share the same geography" but that is quite wrong, as Haiti was actually the undesirable part of the island, an unexploited part that was opportunistically colonised by France because Spain didn't use it. They don't share the same geography or natural resources at all, most of the settled, economically important places both in Haiti and DR are in the plains but DR has more plains than the whole area of Haiti, while Haiti's few plains are mostly salt marshes with cities in the more hospitable areas.

dmurray 5y ago
The article claims the opposite: > Haiti [...] is steadily losing arable land. But it still has more arable land than the entire Dominican Republic, despite being only about half as large in terms of territory! So the D.R. actually had — and has — less opportunity to farm. Seems almost the opposite of your argument, if we substitute "plains that are not salt marshes" for "arable land". I don't know which is true or whether you're actually measuring something substantially different.
- seszett 5y ago
  Weird, but Wikipedia does say of the DR that almost 80% of the total land area [is] suitable for crop production and that the main exports are fruits such as avocado, papaya, bananas, cocoa, etc, which don't grow on arable land anyway. In 1998, arable land totaled 1,020,000 hectares; with land under permanent crops at 480,000 hectares.[0] While on Haiti, it says that of the total arable land of 550,000 hectares, 125,000 hectares are suited for irrigation, and of those only 75,000 hectares actually have been improved with irrigation.[1] So while I'm sure Haiti could do better than what they are doing now, it seems curious to say that it is more suited for farming than the Dominican Republic. I think the author might have misread numbers. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Dominican_Republic#Agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Dominican_Repub... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Haiti#Agriculture,_forestry,_and_fishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Haiti#Agriculture,_...

LightG 5y ago

That's the elephant in the room? Ok ...

Scarblac 5y ago

> This is kind of ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that Haiti was born from a successful slave revolt and and one of the first things it did as an independent country was to expel or kill virtually all the whites, expropriate their property and destroy all the institutions associated with them. Both culturally and genetically (95.5% per Wikipedia), Haiti thus has a lot in common with sub-Saharan Africa, So they were a society of uneducated ex-slaves with no institutions. That's likely enough to explain the difference by itself?

mucholove 5y ago

Seconds elephant in the room not mentioned: Haiti was by far the most productive colony in all of the Americas. The French sold territory from Louisiana to the Rocky Mountains just so they could focus their efforts on keeping Haiti. This is to say that the drop in trade was ENORMOUS because no other nation at the time wanted to consider what a successful slave revolt might mean for them. Dominican Republic (and I am Dominican) was a largely abandoned island with no real economic attractions. People fled after one pirate raid. And for a hundred or so years it was largely empty. One minir nit; You are very right in pointing out the animosity between the former slaves and their enslavers. It is importa however to note that the leader of the revolution, Touissant was actually a bit more compassionate than the average Haitian at the time. Moreover, he was much more interested and capable of management than almost everyone else. Everyone else was uneducated and more importantly deprived of basic culture.

heymijo 5y ago

There is LOTS of context missing before we get to the 1804 massacre of the remaining whites in Haiti. Thirteen years of conflict and war took place before this happened. Why? Enslaved people wanted what the French Declaration of the Rights of Man guaranteed, that "all men free and equal." In struggling for this Haitians were bounced around like a football, between the great powers of France, Spain, and Britain. Every attempt at autonomy or freedom was met with outright force or duplicity aimed at returning Haiti to the status quo of one of the most brutal forms of slavery in history. What's the saying? Fool me once... Dessalines, who ordered the 1804 massacre, had seen all of this, topped off by the French just a few years before taking out Toussaint Louverture, who was forgiving of whites. He had also seen brutality the likes of which we cannot imagine the French staged mass executions via firing squads, hanging, and drowning Haitians in bags Rochambeau invented a new means of mass execution, which he called "fumigational-sulphurous baths": killing hundreds of Haitians in the holds of ships by burning sulphur to make sulphur dioxide to gas them. Should you still think the Haitians more brutal than others, do read up on the British and French exploits in continental Europe during the Peninsular Wars. God help you should you find yourself a non-combatant in a place just taken by siege. Haiti was born in brutal slavery. It has been meddled with incessantly throughout its history by greater powers. If we want to trace a line back, those are the dots to look at connecting.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>He had also seen brutality the likes of which we cannot imagine We don't need to imagine because ISIS filmed it in 1080p for us. Of if you want something a little less cultural exotic there's plenty of examples from the Balkans.
BoiledCabbage 5y ago
Exactly this. To discuss Toussaint and 1804 and not discuss the French commander Rochambeau is extremely misleading. He brought gas chambers to Haiti via and was systematically massacring blacks. The entire war turned brutal. Haiti knew trade was key as they were the wealthiest colony in the west. Toussaint actually negotiated treaties with John Adams and welcomed American investment and trade deals along with other nations. What happened (and again Haiti perspectives comes in to play of who was writing history and what gets emphasized), was a nation of slave gaining independence and defeating Napoleon in military combat. That absolutely shocked the European powers. They were all slave holding counties and their immediate acts was to stop Haiti from succeeding at all costs. In the US Thomas Jefferson took over, and being a southern pro-plavery president he immediately blocked all trade with Haiti knowing that the colony depended on trade to survive financially. France as well planned to essentially starve the country economically and take it back over later. The entire western powers effectively put the country under embargo. They were deathly afraid it would inspire other slave areas to want freedom (lots of texts written about this) and the way they decided to stop it was to ensure Haiti fails as a country. The fighting in that war for independence was brutal and ugly on all sides. Toussaint was a brilliant leader and likely would've taken the country to success. He beat what were considered to European armies is the time. Final after winning again against the French, they invited him to "parley" and when he came for the discussion they captured him and threw him in a prison where he died. They could not beat him and finally that was his they stopped him. For diplomatic negotiation and the capture. And that was maybe the third back stab by the European powers at the time. He was the father of Haiti, their George Washington. His replacement is the one who never forgave that and who militarily was against Rochembeau and who was after this betrayal we no longer want any Europeans here. Previously the British betrayed them, said they'd fight with with against France to end slavery. They agreed - allied with the British and then a the hatians they took all the militarily losses and handed territory to the British to be British free colonies the British came in and started enslaving the Haitians again. The period of that time is insanely complex. All of a sudden I've seen the narrative of OP being pushed everywhere. Because it's "easy" and people can think of Zimbabwe as an easy analogy - that's wrong. And frequently people pushing it then turn it into discussions of current US politics. [And that's where I'll stop because I don't want this to start down that trail]. What went on in Haiti is way more complex than that simplistic narrative.

brudgers 5y ago

expropriate their property and destroy all the institutions associated with them An odd phrasing considering that their own bodies were considered their property and slavery was among the institutions. Government was the primary institution and one which the freed slaves did not abolish.

merpnderp 5y ago
Government and the economy are just people, they're not actually a 'thing'. If you kill off the people who have experience running the economy, government, education system (I know, Haiti's was likely tiny and only for the ruling class and likely consisted of a few private tutors), then there's no one to teach the next generation and you have no government or economy. Instead of killing off the slavers, pressing them into forced restitution as advisors and educators would have been better for Haitians, more satisfying, and just. Why kill the governor who knows not only how to builds roads but where and when they should be built, and instead force him to continue doing his job, only his payment is now a stay of execution?