examples of integrity in history sugar story

By the 1780s, Haiti was consuming 40,000 new slaves a year.

An entire French shipbuilding industry grew out of the need to provide vessels to handle the mushrooming commerce - and the slave trade.īy the 1760s profits began to double every three to four years. Two hundred fifty years ago, sons of French nobility, along with creative investors who built coffee and sugar plantations out of raw Haitian land, could expect to double their money every 10 years. Spain officially ceded the island’s western third to France, and kept what is today’s Dominican Republic. However, as slave numbers doubled by the decade, baptisms lagged. Richelieu, who wanted the colony’s income to create a navy to defeat the English, softened Louis’ opposition by promising all slaves would be baptized as Catholics. Louis XIII, a particularly staunch Catholic for a French monarch, was opposed to slavery. It was a way to provide labor in a country where the indigenous Arawak population had been virtually wiped off the face of the earth by colonizers within a decade of Columbus claiming the land for Spain. Its slavery was initiated - and blessed - by history’s best known and least liked cardinal, Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. But history, too often overlooked in Haiti’s case, does provide a good starting point for understanding how the tiny country arrived at its current status, desperate even before the earthquake. So it is not the natural course of history that would leave Haiti with its current identifying tag: poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. The only devilish element in the Haitian mix might be the domination and manipulation of the nation and its populations over centuries by world powers serving their own needs. There was no “pact with the devil,” as the most absurd religionists would have it, to explain its vulnerability to natural disaster. There is nothing inherent to Haitian culture or religion that renders it naturally vulnerable to every imaginable human catastrophe. It was the dot-com boom of the late 1700s, when it was providing some 40 percent to 50 percent of France’s gross national product, 60 percent of all Europe’s coffee and 40 percent of all Europe’s sugar.

Haiti was once the wealthiest, most lucrative cash-cow in the world.

Examples of integrity in history sugar story