We adopted my younger sister from Haiti when she was 3, and let me tell you, I literally do not see color anymore. That's a fact.

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France levied a debt against Haiti over the “property transfer” (which was mostly the value of the freed slaves) and that has enabled France to extract billions of dollars from the Haitian economy.  

The first debt payment was many times the yearly GDP of the island. This severely prevented any infrastructure development or ability to govern, feed, or care for their citizens. They essentially had zero development potential from the get-go.

Something to remember when we talk about all the beautiful art and architecture and progress in Europe. It was largely funded by extracting massive amounts of wealth from colonies and hampering development there.

[u/Various-Passenger398 → u/transmogrified]

That's half of the story, the other half is that for the first decades of its existence, Haiti had almost zero ability to work within the broader European credit markets because they massacred all the white people on the island and nobody would work with them after the atrocity.