Historiographical Introduction

The proposed manuscript is driven by two notable absences in the current market for Haitian history, Haitian analysis, and poverty studies. First, it will rediscover the lost world of Saint-Domingue, a fascinating biracial society unknown to many Americans. Secondly, it will be unforgiving in its exploration of the missed possibilities for Haitian prosperity. A wide literature, both academic and general, isolates problems of inadequacy in education, agriculture, and civil society without historical depth. For example, Alix Michel, in his 2015, “ Condamne ́ Á La Pauvreté: Une Analyse Des Causes De La Misère Effroyable Du Peuple Haïtien blames over-reliance on foreign aid for Haitian poverty in his synopsis.
Much Haitian scholarship, however distinguished, is reluctant to frontally address the question of Haitian poverty. Julia Gaffield (Georgia State University) and Mary Dewhurst Lewis (Harvard) published scholarly articles in the American Historical Review of June 2020. In his introductory essay to the two articles, Manuel Barcia (University of Leeds) reveals the perverse priorities of academic historians regarding the topic of Haiti. Barcia, for example, celebrates Lewis’s selective focus on the voyage of an illegal slave ship in 1818. The question of poverty is conspicuously absent from the scholarly labors of all authors.