How does a kingdom that once boomed with agricultural output sink into a nation renown for its famine? How does a revolution sparked by the injury of racial inequality give birth to a nation consecrated to racial revenge? And why do historians, for whom such reversals should command their full investigative labors, instead train a laser focus on the diplomatic injuries of the post-colonial nation? These are the faults of Haitian historiography that Bennett Blunt seeks to repair in a provocative new volume on the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.
THE DEVIL LIVES IN HAITI explores the reversal of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, from the richest plantation colony in the world (roughly 1700-1791) to the poorest country in the Americas (modern-day). A profitable plantation economy based on coffee and sugar was disastrously abandoned by the new Republic of 1805 in favor of peasant agriculture. The resulting isolation from the world market squandered the rich resources that had made white (and biracial) planters the envy of the colonial word.
The Devil Lives in Haiti distinguishes itself on the shelves of Haitian scholarship by frontally addressing the question of Haiti’s superlative poverty in the Western Hemisphere. Its bias is against the appalling conditions of the present-day nation, and its method will be the exposing of missed opportunities, rejected responsibilities, and poor policy decisions in the history of the Republic. “The Haitian reversal” also serves as a useful testing ground for competing theories of wealth and value.
The Devil Lives in Haiti is supported by over 10 hours of recorded interviews with Haitian citizens, residing in diverse departments of the nation. The following testimony has been collected to date.
The Haitian Revolution Timeline at Brown University From the citadel of academic prestige, installed on the east side of Providence, Rhode
The Devil Lives in Haiti salutes the bravery of reporter Romeo Langlois and the Haitian police officers featured in this report.
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