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Haiti by Laurent Dubois5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() For generations these and related debt-payments siphoned off the lifeblood of Haiti, amounting by 1914 to 80 percent of the government’s budget. France eventually recognized the new nation but demanded it pay reparations for losses incurred by slave owners. In addition, the major Western powers mistreated Haiti at every turn, exacerbating its troubles. The nation long suffered from the self-inflicted wounds of an unfair class system and cruel, authoritarian regimes, he notes. And only now, in this book, am I returning to our views of Haiti.” Troubled by the racial bias shown against Haitian immigrants during the AIDS crisis, Dubois began to research American perceptions about that island nation: “That became the subject of my junior paper. ![]() His career as an expert on the French Caribbean and the larger Afro-Atlantic world began as a Princeton undergraduate. ![]() “Haiti has an inspiring history,” Dubois tells PAW, “and there’s definitely a sympathy that undergirds the book.” Hellish conditions led, in 1791, to the largest slave revolt ever and eventually to the establishment of an independent nation. Sugar plantations produced vast profits in the French colony. How did Haiti go from being “the most profitable bit of land in the world” in the 18th century to today’s poster child for poverty and wretchedness? So asks Laurent Dubois ’92, professor of Romance studies and history at Duke University, in his account of the troubled nation, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan Books). ![]()
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