Haiti In The World Economy

Class, Race, And Underdevelopment Since 1700

Alex Dupuy

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429721885
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

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 underd

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French Merchant Capital and the Making of a Slave Society in Saint-Domingue

The Development of Slavery in Saint-Domingue

France had planned to establish colonies in the New World since the sixteenth century. But it was not until the mid-seventeenth century that Holland, England, and France began their struggles to challenge Spanish hegemony and gain control over the Caribbean islands. The French conquest of western Hispaniola (later renamed Saint-Domingue) began in 1660 with the capture of the Ile de la Tortue, a tiny island off the northern coast of the mainland. Although it took nearly forty years for France to secure legal possession of western Hispaniola, the French established their dominion over it almost from the start. French encroachments on the island caused several military encounters with the Spanish in 1681 and 1690 and with the English and Spanish in 1695. Finally, in 1697, the Treaty of Riswick officially transferred the ownership of the colony from Spain to France (Madiou 1847, 1:17-20).

From the beginning, France aimed to transform Saint-Domingue into a settlement colony to develop agricultural production and trade. Because the Spanish had annihilated the island's aboriginal inhabitants, the Taino Arawaks, France had to look elsewhere for the labor necessary to carry out its plans. The French first recruited settlers from among the buccaneers living on the Ile de la Tortue. As an incentive for them to migrate to the mainland, the buccaneers received certain commercial privileges from the colonial authorities, including: money advances to start up production, guaranteed shares of the wealth they produced, and exemptioris from half of the duties on the goods they shipped to France. As an additional incentive, and to promote the reproduction of the settler population, the French brought female orphans to the colony and married them off to the buccaneers (de Vaissière 1909, 21-23; Archives Nationales, C9-I). However, the number of buccaneers willing to relocate on the island soon reached its limits, and their recruitment was abandoned. To replace the buccaneers as laborers, the settlers turned to the indentured labor system, which consisted of contracting with landless French peasants to work for a colonial planter for a stipulated number of years in return for land and equipment in the colonies when their contract terminated (de Vaissière 1909, 27; Williams 1970, 96-100).

By 1663, France controlled more than fourteen islands in the West Indies. These colonies offered many potential advantages to France, but it derived little benefit from its Caribbean possessions. France lacked a viable merchant bourgeoisie and had no private financial support for colonial production and commerce. Consequently, France had no choice but to leave its West Indian trade in Dutch hands. The Dutch, employing hundreds of ships, conducted the French colonial trade and brought to France most of the sugar, cotton, tobacco, and indigo that its West Indian colonies produced. Yet, French rulers knew that for France to reap the maximum benefits from its possessions, it had to gain control over this growing and lucrative trade.

Toward this end, the French government decided to organize chartered monopoly companies to carry out the colonial trade. It patterned these companies after the Dutch variety, which had proven so successful and profitable. In 1664, France created the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales (the West India Company), and charged it with the responsibility for conducting trade with the Americas, the French Antilles, and Africa (Archives Nationales, F2A-12). The charter conferred on the company various military, political, and commercial rights. The company had the right to erect forts, manufacture its own munitions, equip an army, and build as many ships as it needed to carry on its operations. The company could appoint governors and officials on the lands it controlled, make its own regulations, and even declare war against and make treaties with foreign powers. The government also exempted the company from one-half of the import and export taxes on all colonial products and received the right of entrepôt in France (Mims 1912, 69-70).

To finance the companies, the French government relied on contributions from wealthy aristocrats, government officials, and merchants. These "subscribers" invested varying amounts in the companies (often under direct pressure from the administration). In 1665, subscriptions amounted to 1,604,360 livres; for the years 1666-1667, they rose to 1,846,440 livres; in 1670, they reached 5,522,034 livres·, and, by 1672, subscriptions totalled almost 8 million livres. Each year, however, the king was the company's principal investor (Mims 1912, 81).

A system known as the exclusif regulated colonial trade and production in the French colonies. Essentially, it stipulated the following: (1) the colonies had to obtain their manufactured and agricultural goods from the metropole; (2) the colonies had to sell their products only to French merchants, and these merchants had to make their purchases in the West Indies only from the French colonies; (3) all trade and transport had to be done on French vessels; and (4) the balance of trade had to favor the metropole (Cavignac 1967, 17). Obviously, France designed the exclusif to eliminate foreign competition in its colonies and to foster the growth of the French national economy. It intended to use the colonies as outlets for French manufactured goods and as suppliers of the raw materials that French industries needed (Sée 1948, 234).

Clearly, the colonial trade was organized to favor French merchants and manufacturers. The government ensured low prices for the colonial raw materials that French manufacturers required and heavily taxed imported manufactured goods that competed with them. At the same time, it lowered (and sometimes eliminated) the taxes levied on French exports. This mercantilist system benefited the French national economy at the expense of both foreigners and the colonies.

Until 1668, private traders who wished to enter the colonial trade first had to obtain the permission of the West India Company. They also had to pay the company a tax of six livres per ton when they traded in the islands, and upon returning to France, they had to turn over 5 percent of the value of their cargoes (Mims 1912, 225). After strong protests from the private merchants, the government issued an edict in 1668 that opened the colonial trade to them with the same trading privileges and tax exemptions that the West India Company enjoyed. Under these new conditions, private trade flourished—particularly in the port cities of Bordeaux, La Rochelle, and Nantes—and the number of ships headed for the Antilles increased dramatically in the following years. In 1662, only 3 or 4 ships set sail for the colonies; in 1670, 60; in 1672, 89; and, in 1674, 131 (Mims 1912, 236). These private traders emerged primarily from the ranks of the bourgeoisie, and their businesses tended to be family-owned operations.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, encouraged the participation of private traders in the colonial trade. His aim was not so much to preserve French trade for the national monopoly companies, but to drive out foreign competition. Granting commercial rights to private traders did not mean that the colonial trade was free and open to all, or that it was regulated by the operation of the free market. Private French merchants still wanted the state to regulate and control the colonial trade. They sought the same trading privileges and exemptions granted to the national companies. They wanted to maintain the exclusif, but to their own advantage. For Colbert, the monopoly companies and private traders were simply different means to the same end: the development of French industry and commerce (Mims 1912, 233).

In December 1674, the government revoked the West India Company's charter. This happened for two reasons. First, the company had abused its commercial privileges in the colonies. Because it had exclusive trading rights, the company typically charged exorbitant prices for metropolitan goods, although it paid extremely low prices for colonial products (Mims 1912, 178). This practice angered the colonists and sometimes caused revolts, such as in Martinique in 1666 (Blet 1946, 157-158). Second, the emerging French bourgeoisie became eager to enter the colonial trade once it had proven to be a secure and profitable investment. Because the West India Company could not expand its operations to keep pace with the growing colonial trade, the government decided to allow private French merchants to participate.

In 1698, France turned over, for a period of fifty years, the entire southern peninsula of the island to a national monopoly company, the Saint-Domingue Company, because settlers had failed to migrate to that part of the colony. In its charter, the company obtained political and economic control over the area. In concrete terms, the French government required the company to populate the peninsula, clear the land, and begin agricultural production. It also meant that the company had a trade monopoly over that part of the island (Archives Nationales, ADVII-2 A).

At the hands of the Saint-Domingue Company, the southern colonists suffered many of the same abuses that the West India Company had perpetrated earlier. Because the company controlled the supply of metropolitan goods to the colony, it charged inflated prices for them. In addition, to guarantee its profits from the sale of colonial goods in the metropole, the company attempted to control their supply in France. It accomplished this by (at times) not buying the entire crop that the settlers produced. The company did not allow the settlers to sell their unbought surpluses to foreign merchants or other colonies, despite their repeated requests to do so.

Faced with an onerous situation and unable to gain concessions from the company, the colonists rebelled. From 1720 to 1722, uprisings against the privileges of the company shook the colony. The inhabitants burned the properties of the Saint-Domingue Company and arrested its governor. The arrival of French troops and a treaty signed in 1722 put a temporary halt to the revolts. But popular unrest lasted until France rescinded the company's charter in 1728 (Madiou 1847, 1:21-22).

After the dissolution of the national monopoly companies as the mam organizers of Saint-Domingue society, the French government placed its direct political representatives in the colony, specifically in the offices of colonial governor and intendant. Although the executive and legislative powers of the colony rested in their hands, the governor was in reality the more powerful authority in the colony; the governor, in effect, represented "the incarnation of the colonial despotism" (Barros 1984, 2:492). The governor, in consultation with the intendant—who was often ignored in practice—formulated the internal laws of Saint-Domingue, commanded the colonial army and police, nominated individuals to all key positions within the administration, fixed and levied colonial taxes, controlled colonial finances, and granted concessions of land (Pons 1790, 3-4; Moreau de Saint-Méry 1784-1790, 5:13-27). From the standpoint of the metropole, the main functions of the colonial state were to maintain order, control the financial resources of the colony, and ensure the transfer of wealth and resources to France (Trouillot 1965, 41-42).

The French government also created colonial councils that served as advisory and consultative bodies to the colonial governor and intendant, who retained veto power over them. The councils gave the colonists a voice in internal affairs and provided an arena where they could express their concerns (Trouillot 1965, 42). They were the centers of colonial opinion, and through them, the colonists struggled for greater control over Saint-Domingue. The councils were also in charge of the administration of justice within the colony. These councils, in time, became the colonial parliaments.

Eventually, the councils sought to undermine the absolute powers of the governor, intendant, and the metropole (Debien 1956, 15-16; Ardouin 1958, 1:7-9). Sometimes they succeeded. At times during the eighteenth century, for example, the settlers resisted paying various property taxes. Fearing a rebellion if the taxes were enforced, the administration acquiesced and collected those taxes over which it had direct control (e.g., import and export taxes, taxes on the sale of slaves) and compromised on others (Trouillot 1965, 42).

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, private French merchants controlled all aspects of the colonial trade. Colonial agents, called factors or commissioners, represented metropolitan merchants in the colony and mediated the exchange of metropolitan goods for colonial products. Merchants and colonists both aimed to obtain the highest possible prices for their sales, while paying the lowest possible prices for their puchases. But because the merchants routinely under/over valued the goods they bought and sold, the colonists were the great losers in these transactions. They had to accept the goods and prices that the merchants presented to them, and they never received the full monetary equivalent of their products (Hilliard d'Auberteuil 1776, 1:253; Pares 1960, 39).

The representatives of the metropolitan merchants in the colony tended to become resident merchants, but as a group, they were unable to consolidate their position. The main reason for this lay in the conflict between merchants and colonists over the prices paid for colonial and metropolitan goods and the ability of each to "buy cheap" and "sell dear." Only those with enough wealth and access to credit survived this warfare. Since the small resident factors could not compete with metropolitan merchants on these grounds, they never became independent and remained subordinate to them.

Merchants manipulated and fluctuated the prices they paid for colonial goods. The merchants sent their cargoes to the colony at times when the prices for metropolitan goods were high and those for colonial products, especially sugar, were low. The most profitable time was after the principal sugar harvests of January/February and July/August when the abundance of sugar tended to reduce its price. The gaps between metropolitan and colonial prices, depending on the product and the season, varied from 6 percent to 70 percent (Cavignac 1967, 206). Always, the prices paid for colonial products only approximated their true values and reflected the seasonal variations of the market—not its short- or lone-term tendencies (Cavignac 1967, 200).

Besides controlling the terms of trade, the metropolitan merchants exercised their domination over the colonists in another important way: through their financing of colonial plantations. Although the money to set up plantations in Saint-Domingue came from within the colony, many other colonists had to set up their plantations by obtaining credits (for money, goods, and equipment) from a French merchant. French merchants, in fact, financed many of the original settlements and plantations in Saint-Domingue. Since many would-be planters generally lacked capital, they relied on the large metropolitan merchants to advance them credit (Debien 1954, 5-6). The merchants ensured the recuperation of their advances by taking charge of the transport and sale of the goods produced on the plantations they financed. By controlling the sale of plantation products in the metropole, they hoped to reduce the risks to the capital they invested in the colony. It took an average of four to eight years to recuperate the initial capital invested in land, buildings, livestock, and equipment needed to start up production...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 French Merchant Capital and the Making of a Slave Society in Saint-Dominigue
• 2 Planter Dependency and the Demise of the Slave Regime
• 3 From Revolutionary Leaders to Ruling Class
• 4 The Growth of the Peasantry and the Stalemate of the Bourgeoisie
• 5 State Power, the Color Question, and Foreign Capital
• 6 Black Nationalism, U.S. Capital, and Underdevelopment, 1946-1986
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index