“A Fossilized Utopia”? Debates over Foreign Landownership and Development in Haiti, 1830s–1870s

Abstract:Haiti’s constitutional article protecting against foreign land acquisition sparked infamy and controversy in the nineteenth century. In self-interested and racist terms, foreign capitalists and politicians condemned the article as if it were anomalous, an unnecessary vestige of the revolution, backward, or even monstrous. This essay considers a strain of Haitian liberalism that also advocated eliminating the protection, especially after coffee prices declined in the 1830s. However, steadfast popular opinion sustained the article through various constitutions. This protectionist conviction spurred multiple anticolonial mobilizations, reaching a peak in the late 1860s and early 1870s, when activists across the island organized against potential US annexation of the east and coaling stations in the west, and in favor of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. These contests over protection offer a prehistory to Liberal and National Party debates in the 1880s, as well as the roots of Caribbean federation independence plans.