The Metropolitan Connection: Foreign and Semiforeign Elites in Haiti, 1900-1915

Abstract

While Haiti's economic dependency and poverty are shared by other Caribbean nations, its history of underdevelopment serves as a prototype for them. Haiti's political independence, achieved in 1804, set the stage for an increasingly difficult struggle to survive among imperialist states. Haiti prefigured the modern Latin American experience and thus provides a classic example of how national aspirations in the hemisphere were derailed. Equally significant, it illustrates the manner in which commerce, rather than plantation enterprise or extensive capital investment, could foster socioeconomic decline.