Reading up on Haiti and the regional history has been more than something of interest of late, not only for the timeliness and event currency, but to see what it is that we can find easily now as history and what was taught to us in our textbooks half a century ago when we did the "in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue" days.
In the late 70s, James Burke put together a PBS series that grabbed at events in time and how they connected - Called interestingly enough, "Connections"...Napolean and the Saturn Rocket that took our folks to the moon for instance (Napolean bottled food for his army instead of using cans which poisoned everyone, bottle = thermos = insulated fuel tanks etc. if memory serves me right. You really need to read this if you haven't seen it or are too young to remember it.
Anyway, seems Columbus's new world stops included "Hispaniola" in 1492 and, you guessed it, the slave trade started there a dozen years later. Ferdinand II established the Spanish slave trade there in 1508 and away we went. The good Catholic Church executed everyone in sight and the connections started flowing.
Now there are a lot of connections past Haiti being a slave trade epicenter, and surely Haiti didn't get into the poverty it has suffered under solely as a result of the founding events, but this seemed to be a fork in the road and the decisions, early on, were to take a route that lead them thusly.
Anyway, I'm stuck in reading about the region in the 16th century for a while as there is a ton of reading to do and if Mr. Burke had the Internet at his disposal, he could have produced a million of these connections.
In the late 70s, James Burke put together a PBS series that grabbed at events in time and how they connected - Called interestingly enough, "Connections"...Napolean and the Saturn Rocket that took our folks to the moon for instance (Napolean bottled food for his army instead of using cans which poisoned everyone, bottle = thermos = insulated fuel tanks etc. if memory serves me right. You really need to read this if you haven't seen it or are too young to remember it.
Anyway, seems Columbus's new world stops included "Hispaniola" in 1492 and, you guessed it, the slave trade started there a dozen years later. Ferdinand II established the Spanish slave trade there in 1508 and away we went. The good Catholic Church executed everyone in sight and the connections started flowing.
Now there are a lot of connections past Haiti being a slave trade epicenter, and surely Haiti didn't get into the poverty it has suffered under solely as a result of the founding events, but this seemed to be a fork in the road and the decisions, early on, were to take a route that lead them thusly.
Anyway, I'm stuck in reading about the region in the 16th century for a while as there is a ton of reading to do and if Mr. Burke had the Internet at his disposal, he could have produced a million of these connections.