Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [211]
One of those social and political differences involved the accident that Haiti was a colony of rich France and became the most valuable colony in France’s overseas empire, while the Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain, which by the late 1500s was neglecting Hispaniola and was in economic and political decline itself. Hence France could and chose to invest in developing intensive slave-based plantation agriculture in Haiti, which the Spanish could not or chose not to develop in their side of the island. France imported far more slaves into its colony than did Spain. As a result, Haiti had a population seven times higher than its neighbor during colonial times, and it still has a somewhat larger population today, about 10,000,000 versus 8,800,000. But Haiti’s area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic, so that Haiti with a larger population and smaller area has double the Republic’s population density. The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side. In addition, all of those French ships that brought slaves to Haiti returned to Europe with cargos of Haitian timber, so that Haiti’s lowlands and mid-mountain slopes had been largely stripped of timber by the mid-19th century.
A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic, with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry, was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves. Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contributed to the country’s development. The people of the Dominican Republic even chose to resume their status as a Spanish colony from 1812 to 1821, and its president chose to make his country a protectorate of Spain from 1861 to 1865.
Still another social difference contributing to the different economies is that, as a legacy of their country’s slave history and slave revolt, most Haitians owned their own land, used it to feed themselves, and received no help from their government in developing cash crops for trade with overseas European countries, while the Dominican Republic eventually did develop an export economy and overseas trade. Haiti’s elite identified strongly with France rather than with their own landscape, did not acquire land or develop commercial agriculture, and sought mainly to extract wealth from the peasants.
A recent cause of divergence lies in the differing aspirations of the two dictators: Trujillo sought to develop an industrial economy and modern state (for his own benefit), but Duvalier did not. This might perhaps be viewed just as an idiosyncratic personal difference between the two dictators, but it may also mirror their different societies.
Finally, Haiti’s problems of deforestation and poverty compared to those of the Dominican Republic have become compounded within the last 40 years. Because the Dominican Republic retained much forest cover and began to industrialize, the Trujillo regime initially planned, and the regimes of Balaguer and subsequent presidents constructed, dams to generate hydroelectric power. Balaguer launched a crash program to spare forest use for fuel by instead importing propane and liquefied natural gas. But Haiti’s poverty forced its people to remain dependent on forest-derived charcoal from fuel, thereby accelerating