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Politics and Economics
The only substantive political revolution that historical documentation accords Haiti is Columbus’s establishment through force of arms of a colonial-mercantilist form of governance in 1492, and its subsequent spread to cover the whole territory by 1512. Exactly what types of indigenous political structures the new forms replaced is uncertain, but there is some certainty that suppression of the population for the purpose of profiting from export of the product of cheap labor to North America and Europe was not a significant component of the pre-Columbian political economy. Haitians did not discover the Old World until 1492.
Also uncertain is the course of history that the territory that later came to be known as Haiti might have followed if fortune had not conspired to unite together Italian mercenaries, Spanish investment funds, a particular wind direction, and the shattering of faith in a flat earth. But the fact remained that fortune willed many things, and in the matter of politics it decreed that the territory would, in perpetuity, have a large proportion of the population in an ordinary category or class having little control over individual or collective destiny, and a very small proportion with total control in a category that for convenience may be called the political class.
Political histories of Haiti from 1492 to 1986 are stories about the movement of people into and out of each category, but mostly about the dynamics of struggle within the political class. The story about the ordinary class is relatively straightforward. Its first members were the indigenous Caribs, and after their disappearance, membership in the class passed to African imports and their descendants. With respect to the political class, membership flowed among private buccaneers, Spanish colonists and soldiers, the British armed forces, and then formally to the French in 1697.
In the years leading up to Haiti’s independence in 1804, the political class developed several factions. These included resident colonists; French army officers and civil administration officials; a group composed principally of mulatto families with commercial interests in towns; and another group containing senior black and (to a lesser extent) mulatto officers in the army. The effect of independence was to reduce the number of major factions from four to two—an urban-based mulatto commercial elite and a rural-based black military elite (which later moved into towns)—and to define the basis of class struggle as battle between the two factions for dominion over the administrative apparatus of government (Nichols, 1979:8).
Administrative dominion meant control of customs receipts, and with such control a faction captured monopoly profits on export taxes and import duties. These revenues financed accumulation of personal wealth and reproduction of power to control the faithful within a faction by rewards of money, other gifts, jobs, contracts, priority access to government services, and other favors. They also financed a large standing army to maintain authoritarian rule over the ordinary class.
With establishment in the late nineteenth and through the twentieth centuries of new, smaller factional groupings composed of Levantine, European, and North American immigrant investors engaging themselves in international commerce and manufacturing, dominion also came to mean power to build alliances with such groups through allocation of monopoly rents attached to export, import, and manufacturing privileges, and through fiscal and other policy measures designed to benefit specific group interests. Such alliances permitted further accumulation of resources useful for amassing wealth and maintaining political solvency.
Whether one faction and its allies or the other faction and its allies found themselves in charge of government, economic policy remained a constant search for extraction and concentration of producer and consumer surpluses in their hands. No government in the history of the territory from 1804 to 1986 (or from 1492 to 1804) did anything of significance to improve the circumstances of ordinary people or to leave them with resources sufficient to permit productive investment and economic growth. Allowing more resources to circulate within the economy of the ordinary class would not have been inconsistent with auto-colonial policies that sought growth of monopoly rents over the long term. But administrators, perhaps preoccupied with immediate concerns attached to the class struggle, perhaps for other reasons, did not have long-term perspectives.
Transient and resident detractors within the class sometimes used colorful phrases like “predatory state” or “kleptocracy” to cast aspersion upon Haiti’s method of governance, particularly with respect to what they perceived as corruption associated with diversion of public resources away from intended purposes (e.g., Rotberg, 1971: 342; Lundahl, 1979: 357). Defenders counterclaimed that while such corruption was recurrent, instances of honest administrative practice vastly outnumbered instances of dishonest practice (Leger, 1907:342–43). Sensationalism, apparently, was easier to sell than truth (Early, 1937: 149). And then there were those who argued that detraction and defence of administrative practice was essentially irrelevant. A more fundamental issue in Haiti was the colonial structure in which the political class did not hear the will of ordinary people, and did not need to hear it in order to rule (Mintz, 1974). Corruption in Haiti was not about diversion of resources from intended purposes, but rather about intended purposes and practices that were themselves diversions from what the concept of “government” was supposed to be about. In Haiti it was a private industry.
Members of the class based outside the territory did nothing to alter the structure. In the nineteenth century, French and German gunboats demanding indemnity payments took from resident factions what the resident factions took from the ordinary class. United States occupation forces pursued the same policy with respect to foreign creditors from 1915 to 1934 and continued to do so without the forces through 1947. Later, foreign-assistance agencies demanded principal and interest indemnities on loans and local counterpart financing of recurrent costs for “development” projects of their own creation that collectively also did little of significance to improve the circumstances of ordinary people.
These projects of Haiti’s shadow government, and demanding extraction of additional surplus, were also products of unilateral actions and factional struggles that at no time required hearing the will of ordinary people. Foreign assistance, perhaps because of the nature of government or perhaps for other reasons, was also a private industry. Dominion over some portion of it allowed Haitian and expatriate members of different agencies to reward themselves and others among the developmental faithful with jobs, contracts, the cloak of expertise, and other favors like career advancement. All of this found justification in good intentions. But at no time—not in 1492, not in 1804 and not in 1986—did any significant group find it necessary to attempt to join their opinions, assumptions or theories about the meaning of good intentions for ordinary people with the opinions, assumptions or theories of ordinary people in their various manifestations as aborigines, slaves, peasants, marginals, masses, or other inculcations of ascribed political powerlessness, like “the poor.”
None of this implies that the actions or inactions flowing out of various groups within the political class were in some universal way morally reprehensible, or that all members of the class necessarily viewed the circumstances of ordinary people without interest, or that no member of the class ever made some serious attempt to understand the circumstances and to attempt serious remedies. Nor does any of this necessarily suggest that if the political class had extended itself to cover the entire population, the distribution of circumstances across the population would have turned out any different. And it does not suggest that Haiti is in any way unusual among developing countries. Other than having come early to the system of auto-colonization, the territory governs itself in much the same way as many other nations, with and without foreign assistance in their systems of gover...
