Haiti, Colonialism and Coffee

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan. Good to see you. You are here in Berlin with me.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I am indeed James. Good to see you too. And where are we exactly though?

JAMES HARPER: We are in Rancilio's BER station, which is kind of like their flagship store like Coffee, playground space in Berlin.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And we're standing in front of Rancilio Sylvia Pro and you've made me stand in front of it. So it's not that I'm in any way stressed. But what if you bought for us to try?

JAMES HARPER: I want to buy some Coffee from the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Hispaniola, which is of course two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic and I have here some Coffee from the Dominican Republic. So Jonathan, pour me a night double of this Coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Ok. Here we go.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So James, I used to have a Sylvia. It's the machine that I first learned to make espresso on but it has been a good while.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: A nice bit of pre-infusion.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I'm liking the color so far, James looking good, getting a little bit light. I think I'm gonna stop it there. Let's go take a seat and try it. I am surprisingly pleased with how it looks.

JAMES HARPER: So, Jonathan here we have a coffee in front of us. What kind of flavor notes are you getting?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, I'm gonna have a, a little slap nice. It's predominantly nutty. It's well balanced, maybe a hint of tobacco. Lovely. She said this is Coffee from the Dominican Republic, right? And I understand, you know, my instructions to you were source of some Haitian Coffee. What's happened?

JAMES HARPER: I tell you what I tried, I really, really tried. I spent an hour one morning trying to find Haitian Coffee to be delivered to me within a week. Could not do it, could not do it. But get this. The Dominican Coffee I bought it was super easy to find and it got delivered within two days. But Jonathan Haiti grows Coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Absolutely right. I mean, at one time, Haiti was literally the biggest Coffee producing region in the world.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And that's the paradox we're gonna explore today.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And I think it's only fair that we say that this is a dark story. There is content in it that I found quite distressing. So I think this is a point to say thank you to Rancilio for enabling us to make this free educational content for the entire coffee community that in this particular instance, I think is very important for the community to hear.

JAMES HARPER: Let's get into it.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan I'm picturing the Caribbean, that kind of archipelago of islands that goes down from the tip of Florida down to South America and let's zoom into one particular island in the archipelago. His Panola, which actually has two countries in it.

JAMES HARPER: On the right side, you have the Dominican Republic and on the left is Haiti. And let's zoom into the left side of the island. Modern day Haiti. It's kind of in the shape of a crab's claw, you know, like it's about to grab something.

JAMES HARPER: Imagine we were in a helicopter taking off from the coast and kind of going up and over the mountains and back down to the water on the other side of the island. What would we have seen 600 years ago?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, James, what you would have seen would have been very much natural scenery, cliffs and rocks, beautiful coasts. You're going up inland, you're going up high, you're seeing forest and I see some indigenous people, what we've called the Taino and not much else. It's a natural paradise.

JAMES HARPER: Let's then fast forward a couple of 100 years. Let's go to the early 17 hundreds. This left side of the island, which today is Haiti was back then called San Dang. What would I see if we did the same little trip of the island?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You're seeing rather different things, James, ports, settlements around the ports and beyond the port cities themselves. You're seeing the first plantations and the development in particular of sugar plantations and you're seeing many more people and those people are of two colors. You're seeing white people, Europeans, primarily French.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And you're seeing many more people of color people from Africa basically working on those plantations. They are enslaved people. They are being shipped in. If we go to the ports, we're actually seeing enslaved people being landed, auctioned and bought on the boats. What about Coffee? There's not that much Coffee at the moment, but as we go up into the interior, the first Coffee plantations are just beginning to be cut out.

JAMES HARPER: Ok. So let's fast forward 50 60 70 years. And we're now in the 17 eighties if we fly over and we were to now zoom into those plantations, those Coffee plantations.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: We're going to see a lot, lot more, a lot more Coffee plantations. Probably by this time, we have well over 1000 really plantations of one size or another, producing Coffee. And we know that Coffee becomes so successful that those French settlers, the second sons or the third sons who would, who would go off and try and make their fortune in the colonies because you know, son, number one is going to inherit the land at home.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And then what do you do with the rest? You either send them into the church or you send them off somewhere to try and make their fortune. In some other way. San Da man ended up attracting emigres who were first sons because it became so rich.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: San Dama became the richest colony of France. It was the place in which you really made your money. So really Coffee has expanded greatly. San Dama, we're looking down at the port cities, we're seeing far many more people, James. This population has expanded enormously. Can't see hardly any of those indigenous people gone.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I can see three elements of society. I can see our white settlers. And then we see and actually notice particularly in the Coffee growing areas. We see a population of as it were sort of mixed race people owning those Coffee plantations.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And of course, we see overwhelming nine out of 10 population still enslaved people either bought from Africa or of descending from those enslaved in Africa.

JAMES HARPER: Now, what have you been on the enslaved on a Coffee plantation? What kind of abuses would they be experiencing?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: A very well documented case, James that explains a lot about what was happening and about Sanderman society. There's a Coffee planter, white Coffee planter. His name is Nicholas Lejeune and he's in dispute with another Coffee plantation.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And what happens is this dispute is actually very unusually taken to court. There's a new colonial administrator at the time who comes in with some sort of quite liberal ideas and goes to investigate Lejeune.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So he goes to Leo's Coffee plantation and what he discovers is how ill treated the workers were and specifically what he finds is two women shackled, kept inside a cell, their arms their legs have clearly been tortured.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: He has basically tortured them through the application of burning hot materials and indeed they later die. Yeah. He takes this to the local court which is, of course dominated by settlers, the enslavers, the enslavers and of course, what do they do? They acquit him.

JAMES HARPER: Oh God.

JAMES HARPER: And in terms of the actual physical work on the plantations themselves, you know, if you are one of the enslaved, how grueling is it?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You know, you'd be taken out to the fields, you could be planting et cetera. You would have a so called slave driver overseeing you that slave driver might well have recourse to a whip in order to encourage you in your work. You know, we talk about the slave drivers. It's worth saying that most of those slave drivers were themselves enslaved or had been enslaved.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And there's some interesting discussions amongst the managers of these Coffee plantations. You know, who should you appoint to be your drivers? Now, some people say, of course you should appoint a good and trustworthy person, et cetera. There are other people who say no, no, no. What you do is you get the nastiest, the least trustworthy, the worst kind of person?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And you make them the slave driver because you aren't gonna trust them and you still have authority over them. But my God, they will terrify the people who need to work. The whole system is based on coercion and and fear. The whole society has to be based on fear because this is a society. We've just been flying over Haiti. I'm counting nine enslaved workers for every one free person.

JAMES HARPER: Ok. And if we fly over 10 years later, so we're now in the early 17 nineties.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: What am I looking at?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, you can see a lot from the air now because you can see smoke.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You see pretty much every plantation within 50 miles of the main cities is ablaze. It's destroyed. If you were to go up to the Coffee plantations, you'll find most of them destroyed. You're seeing people hiding from each other, people attacking each other. You're seeing grotesque acts of violence.

JAMES HARPER: Ok. Let's fast forward another tenish years. But now in the early 18 hundreds. Yeah, what are we looking at?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's 18 04. It's the day that the Haitian Revolution is completed. It's the day that the Haitian General DEA, a man who was formerly enslaved, declares that Haiti is an independent state. And it's also about to be the day that he then declares that all white people are to be killed.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The economy such as it is, you know, how are these people now going to make a living? How are they going to feed themselves? This is a society that in one sense is, you know, the great moment of the first Black Republic and in another sense is a society in total disarray.

JAMES HARPER: Hate is this beacon of freedom in an archipelago of enslavement.

JAMES HARPER: And it's also the beginning of much worse to come. Yes.

JAMES HARPER: And so Jonathan in this episode, I want to explore the story of Haiti, how it became free.

JAMES HARPER: But why that freedom didn't result in prosperity for Haitians.

JAMES HARPER: I want to understand the long term effects of colonialism.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And the roll of Coffee in the center of that.

JAMES HARPER: Of course, I'm James Hopper, a documentary maker and the creator of the Filter Stories Coffee podcast.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And I'm Jonathan Morris, professional historian and author of Coffee, a global history.

JAMES HARPER: And this is the second series of a History Of Coffee where we explore how a tiny psychoactive seed changed the world and continues to shape our lives today.

JAMES HARPER: So to understand the story of Haiti, we have to understand the French revolution and to understand that we have to understand, well, what was France like before the French revolution. So tell me about, you know, the 1st 100 years or so before the French revolution, we're talking the early 17 hundreds.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: This is France under what they call the onion regime, the old regime. And France is the biggest, the most powerful state in Europe. At this point, the king is an absolute monarch, he rules, he decides the rules, he is the guy who drives the government. There is no sort of democratic check on him.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The society is a society built around privileges. You have very wealthy people. Aristocrats and nobility, but not only are they entitled, they're also part of their title is to avoid quite a lot of the taxation that falls on the ordinary people. So it's a very, very unequal society, the people at the top hold all the wealth.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: There's a structure of privilege. And as long as France is overall doing well, that's fine for the king. But the problem is France extends its power further and further, getting involved in a variety of wars. And as a result, it's necessary to start taxing more and more people because the truth is France can't afford these wars.

JAMES HARPER: Interesting if the nobility have most of the wealth, but you're not taxing the nobility at some point, you just won't get enough tax money.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly. So, so look in 17 88 the king's ministers come up with what they think is a very clever plan. What they want to do is bring the voice of the people into the system, particularly. Remember most of these people are peasants.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But what they do is they say, oh, we're gonna revive this old institution called the Estates General in which the nobility, the clergy and what they call the third estates. That's everybody else are all represented and they are to meet and debate and approve what the king wants.

JAMES HARPER: So let's use ordinary people, give them a bit more political power and then they force the wealthiest people in French society to start paying taxes like everybody else.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yes, exactly. Ok. Curious plan. So when the Estates General meets the Estates General has some rather radical ideas about what it wants. And those start with a declaration of the rights of man and the desire that sovereignty, which of course was residing in an absolute monarchy should now reside in the people, the nation.

JAMES HARPER: So you're saying a nation does not belong to a king, it belongs to its people, Correct?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And if it belongs to its people, then all its people have rights within it.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And indeed the Estates General very quickly turns itself into a so called National Assembly that wants to govern and that produces this declaration, the rights of man and the citizen, which essentially asserts that men are equal.

JAMES HARPER: I mean to my 21st century years, this is a pretty fundamental idea that we all have equal rights, but clearly it was revolutionary at the time. And I'm kind of curious like where did this idea come from? How did it develop?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's the debates that are going on in Coffee houses that help form the ideas that get reflected into the declaration of the rights of man. It's in Coffee houses that all of those great French thinkers have been meeting and debating things.

JAMES HARPER: So we now have this revolutionary idea that all people are equal and every person has rights. So when the common people of France start pushing this idea hard, what happens?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Everyone's in a panic. I mean, the Aristocrats and the clergy are rapidly seeing their rights being eroded. You know, their privileges are under attack and the monarchy is beginning to realize that maybe this is gonna be a bit more difficult than they thought and they're gonna have to play a difficult game here.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And the National Assembly is thinking, whoa, you know, maybe we can take more and more bits of power and start doing things for ourselves. And so there are famous moments when they go to the Bastille, which is the political prison.

JAMES HARPER: Oh, that's right. The stomping of the Bastille, right?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Again, by the way, the mob that went and did that was supposedly incited by somebody coming out of a Coffee house and telling them this was what they should do. So we're seeing a kind of popular revolution and it proceeds in exactly the way that many revolutions do, which is to say chaotically, right?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: No one is in charge anymore. It kind of requires its own momentum so quickly.

JAMES HARPER: Just summarizing here we have France is in a political mess where you have the people demanding more and more and more. The king's losing control. The Aristocrats and the clergy are running around like headless chickens. And this thing called the rights of man, it's one of the driving principles of a lot of this political action.

JAMES HARPER: And of course, France at this point is extremely powerful. It's got colonial territories around the world. Including Haiti then known as Samang. So what happens when this idea of the rights of man travels, you know, across the sea to Haiti?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Let's remind ourselves, first of all of the different groups of people in Haiti, you've got the settlers, the white population, the French colonial elite, et cetera. Then of course, you have the vast majority of people on the island, the enslaved people.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But remember, you also have a small group of people called the Jan De Coler, the free people of color. And these are people who are usually the outcome of a union between a master and an enslaved woman. And nearly all of those, they are some form of rape, whether it's violent, whether it's coerced. However you look at it.

JAMES HARPER: So what's their status? They're not enslaved.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: They are legally free people. They are educated, they have access to elite society, but they are not part of it. They cannot become members of the public authorities. So they are very much second class citizens. They can own property. What tends to happen is that their fathers may buy them Coffee plantations.

JAMES HARPER: And to be clear, these are Coffee plantations that use enslaved labor.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yes. In the 17 eighties, free people of color were involved in about 44% of land sales and about 57% of the sales of the enslaved in San Dama.

JAMES HARPER: So with these distinctions in mind, how did this idea of the rights of man, land with these three different groups.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Right. Well, of course, it's creating a lot of problems. So the colonial elite in Haiti, the ruling settler elite liked some of what had been going on in terms of support for the American revolution because they liked the idea of having a greater say over their own taxes. The free people of color think, you know what we should get the rights of man.

JAMES HARPER: So I can imagine they want to be treated like first class citizens and not second class citizens.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. Now there's also the small question of the enslaved, which is of course a huge question with a lot of people, a lot of people and a lot of issues because if you're part of the colonial elite, that bit's terrifying because do the slaves have the rights of man?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Are the slaves gonna be freed? Nobody knows. But of course, the slaves themselves think a change is coming and they hear more and more rumors about what is going on in France and they also agitate for rights.

JAMES HARPER: So let me just recap quickly. If you are an enslave, you have to keep the enslaved in chains because if they get any power and they start rising up, I mean, you're outnumbered. Nine out of 10 people were the enslaved on the island. You're toast. And of course, if you are the enslaved, you would have no issues picking up a knife and overturning this horrendous system.

JAMES HARPER: And you know, along comes this idea, the rights of man, everyone has different takes on what it means. And now the entire social order is up in the air. The analogy here to me is you have an entire room stuffed full of fireworks and then someone throws in a match like it's gonna happen, it's gonna explode in revolution.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The French revolution is the match that sets the whole thing off.

JAMES HARPER: So tell me about the start of the Haitian Revolution.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Essentially in 17 90 the National Assembly excludes the idea of people of color benefiting from the declaration of the rights of man. Oh, wow.

JAMES HARPER: The French laypeople say the rights of man does not apply to anybody who is not white.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: They explicitly explained them in October 17 90. Ok. But at the same time, there are other people who, as we've said, notably the free people of color who for them that becomes the radical touch point. Well, if they're not going to get their rights, what are they going to do? There's a man at this time, another Coffee planter.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And as I said, many of the Coffee planters are free people of color. So this is Vincent O OK. Now Augier had actually been in Paris and he was agitating for the extension of voting rights to free people of color and not necessarily the abolition of slavery, but reform of the condition of the enslaved.

JAMES HARPER: So let me be clear if I were to be OJ as in have African and European heritage. I want voting rights and I want the conditions of the enslaved to be somewhat better.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yes. Right now he gives up on the idea that this is going to happen through normal means. And he goes back to San Zang October 17 90 and set up a army, a radicalized armed group and try and stage an uprising. They don't succeed. He is eventually captured.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: He makes this error in effect and he quickly gives up. He surrenders himself to the authorities. And the thought is that maybe the authorities will treat him leniently because he's surrendered. The authorities do. Oh God, quite the reverse. Ok. So there is a main square that is used for executions.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: This square is divided, there's one bit where you execute whites and one bit where you execute blacks. So OJ is executed in the black execution, half of the square. He's not executed in a nice way. If such a thing exists, he is executed by being broken on a wheel.

JAMES HARPER: Do I ask what that entails?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You basically tie somebody to a scaffold which looks like a wheel and you then go around and break their arms, their shins, their thighs, their pelvis as with all of these executions, it's like this is done to publicly humiliate.

JAMES HARPER: So the white colonists humiliating OJ who is, you know, a person of color that in a way drawing a line in the sand and saying, you're not one of us at the end of the day, you are actually black.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, I know the Haitian Revolution is as complex, if not more complex than even the French revolution briefly walk me through what happens over the next 10 or so years.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So 17 91 we see the start of outright rebellions within San Dang. We have elite people of color such as not OJ anymore, but those who have been associated with OJ or understood his ideas. Most well known being Toussaint Louverture who raise their militias and side with other groups of enslaved who rebel.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And this is an uprising against primarily the white planters and against conditions. It's estimated that about 100,000 people take part in these revolts that about 4000 of the French settler whites are killed. Hundreds of Coffee plantations are destroyed about 900. Wow. And that of course leads to a response. So we get those white owners organizing themselves into militias.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: They strike back and start killing the slaves, kill about 15,000 of the black rebels. And this is just the beginning, correct you have in addition, the invasions of the country by the British and by the Spanish attempting to take advantage of the disarray of the colony with some success, it should be said, but then trying to re enslave people God.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And there is a struggle of many years at one point, the French leadership in the revolution does declare the end of slavery 17 93. But the French revolution itself gets out of hand. There are lots of elements of resistance to that. It becomes extremely bloody.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And in 17 99 a new phase of the revolution however, is entered when a man who had fought with the French army, certain Napoleon takes over. Now, Napoleon has no truck with the idea of people of color being of equal status. He has no interest in ending slavery. Rather. What he wants to do is reimpose slavery. What a bloody mess. It's a total mess.

JAMES HARPER: So how does this end?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: This ends? Because basically the troops that Napoleon ends are defeated by the Haitian rebels. So the army of the enslaved defeats under the sky to say in the forces of Napoleon and forces them out. And in 18 04, the sign declares the independence of Haiti.

JAMES HARPER: How does everybody around Haiti react to the formerly enslaved now having their own country?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Every other society is petrified of what happens in Haiti.

JAMES HARPER: So just freeze frames. Why it just appreciate this? So across the archipelago of the Caribbean and in America indeed. And even in South America, perhaps in Central America are literally all these places operating slave plantations.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yes, literally all across the Caribbean, literally in the Southern United States, literally in parts of South America. So, yes, wow, it is, you know, virtually the only non slave society in the new world. And it is certainly the only black ruled Republic in the new world.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Wow, momentous, momentous, huge and mind blowing actually.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, here we have Haiti. It's a remarkable place where you have formerly enslaved self governing their own country. But you know, like any other country, they need to create an economy, a good livelihood for its people. They gotta create stuff, export stuff. So, you know, how does that work?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The problem really, James is this year you've had all these years of devastation, right? The means of production, the Coffee estates, the sugar production centers, even infrastructure in the ports is all destroyed, right? And we know for example that just with Coffee, how long does it take to get Coffee back? Years and years?

JAMES HARPER: But even if the Coffee plantations get rebuilt, I mean, the fact is Haiti is a country run by the formerly enslaved, surrounded by countries where slavery is rampant. And if the colonial countries Europeans were to begin buying Haitian Coffee and making Haitians prosperous.

JAMES HARPER: It's kind of like saying to all the people in their colonies who are enslaved. If you rebel like Haiti did, you could become prosperous. So I'm assuming that's a major reason Haiti would even struggle to sell any of its Coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly. That would be one major reason for not trading. Absolutely right. And simply to do so would be recognizing that you could trade equally between black and white Oh, I see. So, I mean, I think you can go to a more basic racial level. There, there are other issues too though. Does Haiti have ships?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: No, it's got to have somebody who's gonna bring their ships in and then protect those ships on their way back to Europe or America. Right? You need a navy for that, right? You have the beginning of the growth of Coffee in areas like Brazil and Sandman has been out of the market for what? 20 years?

JAMES HARPER: So it's not like the world is desperate for Coffee. There's plenty of Coffee being offered already.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And then you have one other further question. Let's say that you could find someone to take your Coffee. What are you gonna do when you do not have free labor?

JAMES HARPER: Oh, interesting. Of course.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So that's a massive problem economically.

JAMES HARPER: It's, is it viable anymore?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly. Now that is a big issue? And basically they end up introducing conditions, not slavery, but conditions almost akin to slavery. No way. Your labor is not really compensated in a wage way. It's more compensated by being offered a living. You effectively maintain a system that maintains these people in extreme poverty. Wow.

JAMES HARPER: Ok. Haiti tries to begin growing Coffee again. I mean, the odds are stacked against them but they got to sell it to somebody. So who do they try to sell to.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The big market for Haiti had been France, the other markets in the world tend to work on the same colonial basis.

JAMES HARPER: So the Brits buy their Coffee from their own colonies.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly. You each provision from your own territories. There are monopolies that go who can import Coffee from where you know, it is not a free market.

JAMES HARPER: So Haiti's only real option here is to sell Coffee to France and here comes the grub.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: In the 18 twenties, Haiti goes into negotiation with France to recompense the French and particularly the former settlers for their losses as a result of the revolution in order to get France to be more accepting of their product.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: They do a deal with the devil. It's a deal with the devil and it has a kicker on it. 18 25 there is an agreement by Haiti to pay massive reparations. So originally these are fixed at 100 and 50 million francs, right?

JAMES HARPER: And in today's money, let me just quickly look it up.

JAMES HARPER: There are some estimates that that is 20 to $30 billion right? Why did they say? Yes, why do they agree to this?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Because otherwise they're condemned to even worse poverty because they can't trade.

JAMES HARPER: I mean the French put a real noose around their necks and who exactly is being compensated? Here.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The biggest single payment goes to a man who had been as well as involved in plantations and also been involved in the actual shipping of the enslaved had shipped about 10,000 enslaved people into Haiti and had plantations with about 4000 on. And this guy or rather his descendants received an enormous amount of money.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So a guy who's responsible for the enslavement of 10,000 people at least is compensated.

JAMES HARPER: Compensated by the very people who suffered to make this guy rich.

JAMES HARPER: So what happens next? How does Haiti pay this off?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: How do you pay a big sum of money, James when you don't have that money available? What do you take on debt? Of course, you go and take on debt now you're paying the French. So who probably is quite happy to issue loans to pay back debts to the French government?

JAMES HARPER: A French bank potentially bingo.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Exactly. So what you have is this incredible situation where in effect the French banks loan money to Haiti to pay off this debt, right? But of course what happens when you take on loans, you have an interest rate, you have an interest rate and it compounds very nicely. And this means that literally, I mean, the Haitian government is on its knees just getting together the money to service the debt.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The first payment apparently of this was sent over in boats where they, you know, the money was sealed inside bags inside crates inside iron hoops packed onto ships. But the end result is that the Haitians have virtually no money in their own coffers. And so how can they then raise the money to keep paying the debt.

JAMES HARPER: Well, they sell Coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But how do they raise the money from the Coffee that they sell to pay the debt? I'm not sure I follow. Well, allow me to put it this way. You let the Coffee planters sell the Coffee which gets exported. But you tax the Coffee to get the money into the state. You tax your own exports. Exactly. You tax your own exports.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I think that at one time, two out of every $3 of Coffee tax would be going to service that debt. So nobody is a winner. Here. The people producing the Coffee are actually hardly getting any money for it. It's being taken away by the state. The state is using it all to pay back to the bankers. And this is not a virtuous cycle. This is a vicious cycle, isn't it? This is a spiral.

JAMES HARPER: You're basically running super hard to just stay still.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yes. Exactly.

JAMES HARPER: For how many years does Haiti pay off this debt? Is it like a couple of hard years? And it's over.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You have to be joking.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: How long is it?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: This debt is being paid well into the 20th century? Whoa.

JAMES HARPER: So what are the long term effects of this debt?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: We get a very politically unstable society. 18 43 to 1915, Haiti had 22 governments, 17 of them were actually overthrown in coups or revolutions. What?

JAMES HARPER: That's like? That's like every couple of years it's like every five years new coup, it's indicative of the lack of functionality and you just can't help but look at the parallels today. The government is to all intents and purposes, not functioning president was murdered. And there hasn't been a functional president since it's widely acknowledged that gangs control a lot of Haiti.

JAMES HARPER: The country is utterly paralyzed to the point where they're asking for international intervention. Yeah. And of course, there are massive economic effects. I mean, what is the shit DP per capita of Haiti? Let me quickly look it up GDP per capita. So, wow, that's low. Wow. $1800 GDP per capita in 20 2021. Good God.

JAMES HARPER: Let's look at the other side of the island, which now would be the Dominican Republic $8500.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, there's your comparison. That's unbelievable.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's shocking, isn't it?

JAMES HARPER: It is more than four times poorer than residents on the other side of the island. Yeah.

JAMES HARPER: When I think about colonialism and the effects of colonialism in Coffee history, the the thing that really shocked me the first time is just slave plantations, how the enslaved were treated just utterly horrendous. What the story of Haiti has shown me is that the effects of colonialism go much further than just that.

JAMES HARPER: Even when a country isn't ruled by colonizers, Haitians still suffer economically because the world order is controlled dominated by colonial powers. There is no way Haiti would ever have been allowed to be prosperous. And the third thing that really hits me is the invisible chains, the invisible agreements like Haiti taking on ridiculous quantities of debt for reasons which are today just unbelievable.

JAMES HARPER: This should never have happened. So, I mean, Haiti suffered in three major ways. Enslaved Africans went through hell. Racism prevented the country from even trying to be prosperous and in any case, they couldn't be prosperous because they was dragged down by a huge amount of debt. And the impacts of today are just so stark. Haitians are almost five times poorer than their neighbors.

JAMES HARPER: We do not have the pleasure of tasting Haitian specialty Coffee because it's such an underdeveloped Coffee sector. The value of Coffee exports globally is tens of billions. And yet Haiti's share of that is just $1 million microscopic. The effect of colonialism reverberate even today in Haiti. And for how much longer will they reverberate?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The answer to your question is it will continue to reverberate until as long as we in the Coffee community can help turn this around. Haiti has suffered from vast under investments in its Coffee sector. So it's no longer modernized. We couldn't find any specialty Coffee from Haiti because there's so little available.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But what we as a Coffee industry need to be out there working with the small Coffee farmers now in Haiti, bringing them up to date with how to produce Coffee in ways that will create a specialty Coffee that they can then earn revenue from. So I think this is on the Coffee industry.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's been a very dark story. Let's turn it round and turn it into a positive outcome.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That's really what we need to do.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Thanks for listening to this, the second episode and the second series of the History Of Coffee Podcast.

JAMES HARPER: And do tell me what's coming up in the next episode.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I think it's time for us to look at where Italy's revered espresso culture actually came from and why it's a lot more recent than we think.

JAMES HARPER: And if you did listen and want to hear it right now, it's actually out on the a History Of Coffee podcast channel link in the show notes. But if you're listening to this on the Filter Stories channel, it'll come up in two weeks.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And again, we'll be posting some images relating to the story that we've told today. I will post on my social media, which is Instagram At Coffee History. JM, images around the French revolution and of the historical figures involved in the Haitian Revolution.

JAMES HARPER: And on my Instagram at Filter Stories podcast. I will post some images of what Coffee growing in Haiti looks like today.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: As always, I'm gonna say, if you want to get more into your Coffee history, please come and have a look at my book, Coffee, a global history.

JAMES HARPER: We have a link in the show notes. And if you haven't already. Please do press subscribe so you can get future episodes and what would mean a lot to us if you could also write a review on Apple podcast, it helps the algorithms promote the show to people who like Coffee or history so we can get this story to more ears.

JAMES HARPER: And another thing you could consider is if you have an Instagram account, take a screen grab of yourself listening to this episode on your podcast player, post it as a story tag me and Jonathan and I'll reshare it on my Instagram. And perhaps Jonathan, you will too.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I surely will James. I want to thank Rancilio for enabling us to create this free educational content about the History Of Coffee and particularly with this episode, James of enabling us to do the kind of work that we think is important.

JAMES HARPER: Yes, the Rancilio team have been extremely supportive of us telling the story and one way you can show your support to is if you are actually in the market for a home espresso machine grinder or maybe a Coffee machine on your bar, you can check out Rancilio's equipment by following the link in the show notes.

JAMES HARPER: Now, a History Of Coffee is produced by myself, James Harper and you, Professor Jonathan Morris, I edit everything together and also write and play the piano music.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So we're looking forward to speaking with you again next time and perhaps in the interim, you want to say, see if you can get yourself a cup of Haitian Coffee. Oh, we really love that.