Xenophobia and Economic Decline: The Haitian Case, 1820-1843

The international situation in which the early Haitian republic found itself between 1820 and 1843 aggravated its internal problems and precipitated its economic decline. The economic structure of the new country had been weakened by the destruction of the colonial sugar plantations during the war of liberation against France (1791-1804). It proved impossible to resurrect these in the republican era, because of the lack of capital and the unwillingness of the ex-slaves to return to plantation life. They wanted property of their own, and this insistence forced successive governments to distribute land to them. Only Henri Christophe, who ruled the North as a kingdom (1806-1820), succeeded in maintaining the old system through forced labor; an experiment which died with him. Dramatic as these changes were, however, they were not sufficient to prevent the resurgence of a new economy based on coffee; a crop which was well suited to peasant cultivation. The shift towards coffee exports had begun in the last years of the colonial era and accelerated in the years after 1804. An economy of smallholders engaged in the cultivation of coffee and provisions existing alongside the remaining plantations could have provided a modest foundation for economic growth. Alexandre Pétion, the first president of Haiti (1806-1818), had envisioned this possibility and it was one of the reasons which he gave for carrying out the first land reform in Latin America. Haiti was a major exporter of coffee in the first half of the nineteenth century, and there were a number of foreign merchants already present in the country to purchase the crop. Instead of economic prosperity, the years after 1820 witnessed an economic decline which made the first black nation virtually ungovernable after 1843 save by the rule of caudillos.