Alex Dupuy - Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700

Haiti in the World Economy

Ronald H. Chilcote, Series Editor

Dependency and Marxism: Toward a Resolution of the Debate, edited by Ronald H. Chilcote

The Fitful Republic: Economy, Society, and Politics in Argentina, Juan E, Corradi

Latin America: Capitalist and Socialist Perspectives of Development and Underdevelopment, Ronald H. Chiicote and Joel C. Edelstein

Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700, Alex Dupuy

Available in hardcover arid paperback.

Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700

Alex Dupuy

First published 1989 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Dupuy, Alex.
Haiti in the world economy : class, race, and underdevelopment since 1700 / Alex Dupuy.
p. cm.(Latin American perspectives series ; no. 4)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8133-7348-4
1. HaitiEconomic conditions. 2. HaitiSocial conditions. 3. Investments, ForeignHaitiHistory. 4. ExportsHaitiHistory. 5. Social classesHaitiHistory. 6. HaitiRace relations. I. Title. II. Series.
HC153.D86 1989
330.97294dc19

88-16920
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-01392-9 (hbk)

I would like to thank Wanda Dupuy, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene D. Genovese, Barry Truchil, Franck Laraque, and Marjorie Bray for their useful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this book. I also want to thank the editors of Westview Press, especially Carol Anna, Copy Editor, for her excellent editing job, Associate Editor Lauri del Commune, and Senior Editor Libby Barstow. I am also grateful to Wesleyan University for its Project Grant support in the Summer of 1984.

Alex Dupuy

Under French colonial domination in the eighteenth century, Haiti, then called Saint-Domingue, was the most productive and one of the wealthiest of all the Caribbean slave colonies, whether French, English, or Spanish. After waging the only successful slave revolution in modern history, Haiti gained its independence from France in 1804 and thus became the second independent nation in the New World (after the United States) and the first in the Caribbean and Latin America. Despite this glorious revolutionary beginning, however, Haiti has become the poorest and most underdeveloped country in the Western Hemisphere today. In contrast to the other Caribbean and Latin American nations, Haiti currently has the lowest per capita income, the highest rate of infant mortality, the lowest life expectancy, the highest rate of illiteracy, and one of the highest rates of unemployment. The majority of Haitians live in conditions of absolute poverty and suffer from various degrees and forms of malnutrition, which account for the majority of infant deaths.

This book seeks to explain the causes of Haiti's underdevelopment since the end of the seventeenth century. During the 1960s and 1970s several original paradigms emerged to explain the causes and persistence of underdevelopment in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the renewed effort to understand the associated processes of development and underdevelopment, four models became highly appreciated: dependency theory, world-system theory, modes of production theory, and plantation economy theory. It was the fourth perspective that became widely used by indigenous and foreign scholars to account for the peculiarities of the Caribbean economies.

Initially developed by scholars based at the various campuses of the University of the West Indies who formed the New World Group, the plantation economy perspective proposed an original version of dependency theory that claimed to be applicable to all those Third World countries that shared the experiences and structural characteristics of the Caribbean (Girvan and Jefferson 1971). Unlike those writers who make use of the concept of plantation economy to refer only to slave regimes, this new version of the theory sought to establish theoretical linkages between contemporary Caribbean underdevelopment and the plantations established during the period of colonial slavery.

Two different versions of the plantation economy perspective came into prominence. Beckford (1972, 1975), Best (1968), and Levitt and Best (1975) developed one version of the model. Mandle (1972, 1982) proposed quite another. Whereas Beckford, Best, and Levitt stress the external determinants of Caribbean underdevelopment, Mandle emphasizes its internal causes.

Beckford, Best, and Levitt argue that the legacies of the plantation economy largely account for the Caribbean's inability to develop. Drawing largely from the experiences of the Commonwealth Caribbean countries, they delineate three stages of historical development: "Pure Plantation Economy" (1600-1838), "Plantation Economy Modified" (1838-1938), and "Plantation Economy Further Modified" (1938 to the present).

Plantation economies emerged in the Caribbean following its colonization by western Europe in the seventeenth century and the introduction of African slavery as the dominant form of organization of labor. The plantations were hierarchically organized "total institutions." With their integration into the capitalist world-economy, the plantation economies of the Caribbean explicitly functioned to meet the requirements of the central metropolitan economies. The plantations supplied western Europe with agricultural and industrial raw materials for its burgeoning manufactures and, in turn, imported the finished goods that the industrializing nations produced (in part from these materials). Because of the external orientation of production, the plantation economies lacked any internal dynamic of their own, remained dependent on outside initiatives, and failed to establish linkages with other sectors of production. These linkages would have provided the necessary preconditions for integrated development. In the end, the plantation economies of the Caribbean became "passively responsive to metropolitan demand and metropolitan investment" (Beckford 1972, 44-46; Levitt and Best 1975, 37).

Moreover, the metropolitan economies exercised monopoly control over the trade with the colonial plantation economies. The mercantilist regulation of colonial trade, coupled with the repatriation of the profits generated from plantation production, drained Caribbean economies of their wealth. This unequal commercial exchange between the center and the periphery further reduced the possibilities for the internal accumulation of capital.

According to Beckford, Best, and Levitt, the plantation economy continues to exist in the present-day Caribbean, despite the changes brought about by the abolition of slavery, the emergence of wage-labor relations, and the gaining of political independence. They insist that the plantation economies continue to function as before. The only major difference is that now multinational corporations, instead of the colonial powers, absorb and transform the goods produced on the plantations. In other words, the multinational corporations have replaced the metropoles as the "centers" controlling investment, technology, final processing, and distribution, in addition to decisively influencing government policy (Beckford 1972, 47-48).