Killa Mike – one half of my 3rd favorite rap crew, Run the Jewels – recently went hyper-viral for his televised “wither Haiti” argument with hip comedian Bill Maher. During a live taping of Maher’s hit TV show, the hip-hopper and community activist accused European France of “eating off” and “living” off the poor Caribbean island for decades – a reference to the $112 million francs ($560 million in 2022 U.S. dollars) once paid by Haiti to France following the island’s successful revolt against colonial rule.
Mike’s witty, if unoriginal, argument is that the loss of this money – which could have added up to $21 billion to the Haitian economy over the past 200 years, had it remained in the country and been invested well – is largely responsible for Haitian poverty today. This claim, along with Maher’s factual ripostes to it, leads directly into a major debate that is re-opening today: to what extent was colonialism responsible for the wealth of the modern West, and are reparations owed by European states to former colonies as compensation?
As I argued a week or four back, not that much of one, and no. In the specific case of Haiti, first, there is a great deal more to the story than “bronze man good, blanc man bad.” France did not send the new Haitian government war and reparations bills for nothing. The Haitian War of Independence, which took place roughly between 1791 and 1804, was astonishingly brutal even by the standards of the time. It cost the lives of roughly 50,000 French regular troops (some felled by disease) and “over 100,000 Black and mixed-race Haitians.” Following the fighting, legendary Haitian General Jean-Jacques Dessalines killed essentially the entire French Creole population of the island, including thousands of poor whites who owned no slaves.
An online but well-sourced account notes: “(For) four months, death squads operating under Dessalines’ orders roamed around the island and systematically executed white French that were found. The massacre was not restricted to slave-owners; merchants and working-class French people were also executed. Women and children were killed, although some women were given the choice of marrying a black man or facing death.” A bit later on: “The term genocide is sometimes used for this massacre of French Creoles after the success of the revolution, when all of Haiti was already under rebel control.”
The academic record largely confirms this take. Researching this topic, I rather easily found Dr. Philippe R. Girard’s interesting article “Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti, 1802-04,” in Patterns of Prejudice journal. In it, the good doctor notes that both blacks and whites are on record as having considered genocide– in this era, a thing neither uncommon nor recognized with a label – against their annoyingly resilient opponents.
However, while Caucasian soldiers certainly carried out small-scale massacres, they fell short of anything worse because of final “French military defeat.” In contrast, “Blacks won the war and eradicated Haiti’s white population in 1804.” The victorious side, if this even needs to be said, also appropriated all buildings, land, fine livestock, and so on that had been the property of the permanently dispossessed French. The Europeans were billing Haiti’s new ruling administration for this, not for hurt feelings.
It also must be noted that all reparations from Haiti to France were paid back – including secondary indemnities to banks and such – by 1947, 78 years ago. And, while $560 million – much less the hypothetical $21 billion – is a hefty sum of money, the left side of the island of Hispaniola has received far MORE in foreign aid since that time from the United States, France herself, and other major nations. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, following one major earthquake, bi- and multi-lateral governmental and corporate action funds raised and allocated “$13.34 billion to relief and recovery efforts in Haiti.” Of these monies, almost $7 billion had already been disbursed at the time of the official UN report linked in this article.
And, what happened? Not always very much. The highly reputable International Red Cross committed a half billion dollars and – after all manner of local and even internal corruption and incompetence – built exactly six permanent homes (albeit nice ones). The Clinton Foundation did no better. Their “permanent build” of “hurricane proof shelters” consisted of 20 pre-fabricated FEMA trailers more than one year after the disaster.
Quite a bit of the money involved seems to have simply been stolen by local power-brokers and goons, making a wise man wonder whether that $112,000,000 Francs sent back to the French would truly have become tens of billions over centuries of most-careful care. Thirteen years after the great quake, Haiti’s legendary main cathedral still lies in ruins in the capital, and much of that city (Port au Prince) is ruled over by a cannibal warlord called “Barbecue.”
All this opens up a deeper question: to what extent, overall, was the current wealth of Western powers (like France) stolen from poor Third World countries (like Haiti)? Is the relative prosperity of modern Britain, say, the result of the historic exploitation of Kenya or Jamaica or the Dravidian South of India? Were the monies “heisted” from Haiti by France – some of which apparently built part of the Eiffel Tower – causal for the luxury of modern Paris?
It has certainly become trendy to answer this question with a “Yes!” Colonialism and her cousin slavery definitely did make some individual families wealthy beyond belief, and academically influential Marxists have argued that overseas political exploitation represents the final and most lucrative “stage of capitalism” at least since Lenin.
But, a social-scientific analysis using actual counter-factuals indicates that the answer is: “Probably not.” Most notably, European nations conquered ‘minority’ great powers rather than vice versa – logically indicating that the former had a material advantage in weaponry, treasure, and soldiers even before the incorporation of spoils from the latter. Between 1492 and 1565, for example, Spain alone took over almost the whole of her Iberian Peninsula, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, most Maya kingdoms, and the whole of the Philippines. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” – and well-organized military and banking systems – obviously had much more to do with this series of blitz-kriegs than did any previous colonial exploitation on Spain’s part.
Second, European nations which had NO substantial colonial history – but which also benefitted from the Industrial Revolution, the post-Gutenberg development of the printing press, and other innovations taking place on the European sub-continent – became fully as wealthy as the colonizers and remain so today. In terms of PPP-GDP per capita, the standard measurement of national prosperity, the ten richest states in Europe are currently: Luxembourg, Ireland (!), Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, San Marino, Iceland, and Belgium. Of these, only Belgium was a colonial power – and a 3rd tier, if brutal, one at that.
Beyond this kind of logical analysis, we now have a lot of hard numbers. In 2024, Dr. Kristian Niemitz of the center-right Institute of Economic Affairs crunched centuries worth of now-available data in the fascinating text Imperial Measurement: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Western Colonialism. He concluded that “colonialism and the slave trade were, at best, minor factors in Britain’s prosperity and may have been net loss-makers.”
Dr. Niemitz notes that a “prominent anti-capitalist narrative” does argue the opposite – that slavery and the old Empire “are the basis of Britain’s wealth” – and that a serious scholar has to respond to it. However, he notes that all trade with the obviously less developed, and largely independent, colonial possessions can be calculated at only 7-15% of industrial Britain’s over-the-years economy. “Slave-based…plantations,” in particular, added less than 3% to that economy: making a slightly less significant contribution than the farming of sheep.
Niemitz also makes a point that is, in hindsight, extraordinarily obvious, but which I have rarely seen in print before. As the over-lord of a far-flung empire, and as a fairly good one, Britain also spent a remarkable amount of English gold out in the colonies – building roads and railways, putting down vicious local wars, setting up schools, and otherwise providing what both Brits and a population like Sikhs would have thought of as “good lordship.” The cost of all this rather easily “could have outweighed any benefits,” although it might not have.
All in all, the case study of Haitian reparations does illustrate something – but that thing is the complexity of history rather than “the eternal wickedness of the white man.” France didn’t bill Haiti for nothing, but for a mutually bloody and probably genocidal war, which killed 150,000 brave men. Haiti paid this money back in full around the time of World War Two, has received $20,000,000,000 in free cash since, and is still a mess. This pattern repeats globally: the colonial powers of the past were not rich and functional because they conquered, but rather were able to conquer other warrior peoples because they were relatively rich and functional.
The best thing to learn from the past, probably, is not that some races and nations are good and others evil, but that none of us want to repeat the vast majority of what all of us did.
Wilfred Reilly is a professor, author, and Pacific Research Institute senior fellow.
