Introduction

The United States’ occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934, transformed the country’s economy and social structure. Toussaint Louverture had envisioned Haiti as a beacon of freedom on the western shores of an Atlantic-wide revolutionary movement; the mode of production would be free wage labor retained in an efficient plantation system, providing the surpluses needed for economic development. Yet Toussaint’s vision for participating in a transatlantic revolutionary experiment died with the Jacobins’ elimination and with Toussaint’s personal end at the perfidious hands of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, who saw to Toussaint’s capture and later death.

Haiti’s was the first revolution in the Americas that both liberated a nation from a colonial power and also changed the social structure of that freed territory. Always punching above its weight on the world’s historical stage, Haiti not only achieved independence from France, but also served as an inspiration to Africans and their descendants enslaved in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, this newly minted revolutionary state provided both political and material support to the Bolivarian revolutions that followed in Haiti’s wake. With Haiti as an example, most of Latin America’s newly birthed states rejected slavery, leaving those remaining, such as Brazil and Cuba (not to mention the United States to the north), conspicuous for their retention of archaic (if not cruel) slavery-based modes of production.

Because Haiti eliminated slavery on its soil and accelerated slavery’s demise elsewhere, it represented the most dangerous of examples to those still dependent on slavery and empire. Thus the United States and France vilified Haiti. France treated Haiti as a pariah state. Haiti’s emergence resulted in Napoleon Bonaparte abandoning France’s project of building an empire in the Americas and liquidating its vast North American territory to the United States in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. At the same time, France imposed a financially ruinous indemnity on Haiti as a price for recognizing the new nation’s independence.

The inheritors of the revolution started by Toussaint strove for an independent Black republic that upheld the plantation system. While the plantation system provided capital for Haiti’s elite, however, it was an object of hatred and oppression for Haiti’s newly freed population. Resistance from them, as well as centrifugal forces at work among the elite political classes, led to the plantation system’s collapse within roughly a generation of the establishment of Haiti’s independence. This collapse began in southern Haiti under President Alexandre Pétion and his land reform measures, which were the first of their kind in the Americas. Haiti’s peasantry emerged as people migrated to a subsistence agricultural existence in the hills, removed from a strong state and from the control of plantation life on the lower plains.

Occupation by the United States changed this agency for Haiti’s peasants. US investments in new plantations and infrastructure provided the means by which some of Haiti’s peasants were returned to plantation life and immersed in labor circuits of international trade. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians emigrated to work on US-owned sugar plantations in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Under the US occupation, the autonomy of the Haitian state was lost, and progress toward building local industry was stunted. Moreover, the US occupation’s privileging of the mulatto elite in Haiti impeded the growth of the Black middle class. However, educational reforms slightly increased the number of middle-class families. The economy remained on this new trajectory even after the marines departed in 1934. The frustrated ambitions of Haiti’s Black middle class resurfaced, and their grievances eventually gave rise to François Duvalier in 1957. Resentments over divisions by class and color, combined with the United States’ full support of Duvalier for his ardent anticommunism, endorsed the Duvaliers’ suppression of dissent. Under these conditions, Haitian emigration returned in earnest and has continued growing in size to the present.

At the end of the twentieth century, democratic movements emerged across the global political landscape: the Tiananmen Square protest and the dissolution of the Soviet Union are two prominent examples. In...