NYT: The Ransom

[simpleSimon]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html

The Root of Haiti's Misery: Reparations to Enslavers
By Catherine Porter, Constant Méheut, Matt Apuzzo and Selam Gebrekidan

...Ms. Present's ancestors put an end to that, taking part in the modern world's first successful slave revolution in 1791 and establishing an independent nation in 1804 — decades before Britain outlawed slavery or the Civil War broke out in America.

But for generations after independence, Haitians were forced to pay the descendants of their former slave masters, including the Empress of Brazil; the son-in-law of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I; Germany's last imperial chancellor; and Gaston de Galliffet, the French general known as the "butcher of the Commune" for crushing an insurrection in Paris in 1871.

The burdens continued well into the 20th century. The wealth Ms. Present's ancestors coaxed from the ground brought wild profits for a French bank that helped finance the Eiffel Tower, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, and its investors. They controlled Haiti's treasury from Paris for decades, and the bank eventually became part of one of Europe's largest financial conglomerates...

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/23/world/haiti-france-ransom


Assuming the sources and the arc of the article are corroborated this is journalism at its best!

[apl68]

I was skeptical when I first saw those claims years ago, but then saw them corroborated.  The story is starting to become better and better known--kind of like the long-forgotten Tulsa riots and other atrocities of the 1920s.

Seems like I recall learning in grad school that Russia's serfs had to pay quitrents in order to keep farming the land, as compensation to their lords for their emancipation in the 1860s.  I also believe that legal emancipations in some northern states and British colonies involved state compensation for the value of those emancipated.  One of the greatest tragedies of American history is that so many states refused to work out that sort of peaceful winding-down of slavery.  It would have been doable without civil war or violent revolution.

[simpleSimon]

I was skeptical when I first saw those claims years ago, but then saw them corroborated.  The story is starting to become better and better known--kind of like the long-forgotten Tulsa riots and other atrocities of the 1920s.

Seems like I recall learning in grad school that Russia's serfs had to pay quitrents in order to keep farming the land, as compensation to their lords for their emancipation in the 1860s.  I also believe that legal emancipations in some northern states and British colonies involved state compensation for the value of those emancipated.  One of the greatest tragedies of American history is that so many states refused to work out that sort of peaceful winding-down of slavery.  It would have been doable without civil war or violent revolution.

I find it alternately amusing and deeply disturbing that you were skeptical about these claims when you first learned of them years ago.  Why where you skeptical?  I pose this question not as a personal attack but as a genuine attempt to understand why you (and so many others) would be skeptical about such economic theft when the wholesale intimidation, thefts, and murders associated with slavery were so widely known and well documented. 

We have long known that Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas even as the Dominican Republic and other island nations developed apace with their peers.  Why has Haiti been so persistently poor?  When I was a student I learned of the "developed" world's reaction to the slave insurrection: Haiti suffered an economic blockade lasting decades from nations like the U.S., France England, and others to punish them for daring to end slavery and to squash the example they set to other slaving nations.

The ransom and "double debt" is all news to me... but surprising?  Not at all.  It explains so much in painful detail.

I thank you in advance for a thoughtful reply.

[mamselle]

It goes back to the 13th c.:

      https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/from-servitude-to-freedom-william-chester-jordan/1140938895

M.

[dismalist]

I wouldn't call it "ransom", rather "compensation" or "extortion".

The difficulty with "reparations" claims for slavery is that slavery was perfectly fine until our western morals changed. [And maybe our morals changed because we realized that outside of cotton, sugar, and maybe tobacco, slavery was inefficient.] Under our former morals, the French claim for compensation is entirely just. Under our later morals, it's extortion [the French had more cannon].

By the way, the British compensated their slave owners in their colonies. That came out of taxes. In those days, because of the technology of tax collection combined with who was allowed to vote, the tax burden fell inordinately on lower income people. So we had poor whites compensating rich whites for their losses. At least it avoided civil war, where poor whites got killed for freeing black slaves.

Compensation for manumission was often proposed in the US. It was only ever actually done in Washington, DC, which became integrated until Wilson became president. Self payment by slaves for manumission was expressly forbidden in the Southern States, in sharp contrast to other slave owning societies.

Choose which set of morals applies. If old morals, then descendants of slaves should thank and pay white people for freeing them. If new morals, one should pay the descendants and not just talk about it.

A practical approach might be to apply something like a statute of limitations to the acts we now consider evil but didn't then.

Zwei Seelen hab' ich ach in meiner Brust.

[Parasaurolophus]

FWIW, we learned about this in high school. Aristide was demanding reparations from France at the time. Then the US kidnapped him and overthrew his government. (There was the Ottawa Initiative, too, so our hands aren't entirely clean up here either.)