To understand Haiti’s contemporary challenges, many historians argue, one must understand its colonial history as Saint-Domingue — the most profitable colony in the world in the 18th century, producing more sugar, coffee, and indigo than any other colony and generating extraordinary wealth for France and its colonial elite on the backs of enslaved African labor.
At the height of its colonial production, Saint-Domingue produced approximately 40 percent of Europe’s sugar and more than half of its coffee. The colony’s wealth was extracted through a system of plantation slavery that was among the most brutal in the Atlantic world, with an enslaved population that was worked to death at such a rate that the colony required constant new imports of enslaved people from Africa to maintain its labor force.
The revolution that ended this system also ended the plantation economy, but the legacy of colonialism shaped everything that followed. The forest cover that plantations had stripped from the land never fully recovered. The infrastructure had been built for extraction rather than development. The social structure — deeply unequal, with a small elite controlling the nation’s wealth — persisted in new forms.
When contemporary Haitians demanded accountability for the PetroCaribe funds in 2019, they were demanding something their country had sought since its founding: that its resources be used for the benefit of its people rather than extracted by those in power. The historical resonance of that demand was not lost on those who knew their history.