Haiti, US health insurance, and British-Caribbean abolition: Paying for your own murder through debt
(Originally posted elsewhere on 23 May 2023.)
Compilation. Again. Sorry. Guess the theme.
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Excerpt 1:
[S]low death occurs not within the time scale of the crisis, not of the event [or singular moment] [...], but in “a zone of temporality ... of ongoingness, getting by, and living on, where the structural inequalities are dispersed [...].” Slow death is, quite simply, “a condition of being worn out [...].” If debility is endemic to disenfranchised communities, it is doubly so because the forms of financialization that accompany [...] the privatization of services also produce debt as debility. This relationship between debt and debility can be described as a kind of “financial expropriation” [...]. Debt peonage [...] is an updated version of [...] [the] critique of “choice” under capitalism. Debt as enclosure, as immobility, is what Gilles Deleuze writes of [...]: “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” This is especially true [...] in the United States, where health care expenses are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy, a capacitation of slow death through debt undertaken to support one’s health. This theory [...] entails that [...] one is [...] paying for one’s own slow death, through insurial and debt structures predicated on risk and insecurity, and essentially forced into agreeing to one’s own debilitation. [...] More perniciously, one could suggest [...] that finance capital enforces repeated mandatory investments in our own slow deaths [...].
Text above by: Jasbir K. Puar, “Introduction: The Cost of Getting Better,” The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017).
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[W]hat France did to the Haitian people after the Haitian Revolution is a particularly notorious examples of colonial theft. France instituted slavery on the island in the 17th century, but, in the late 18th century, the enslaved population rebelled and eventually declared independence. Yet, somehow, [...] the thinking went that the former enslavers of the Haitian people needed to be compensated, rather than the other way around. [...] Haiti officially declared its independence from France in 1804. [...] On April 17, 1825, the French king [...] issued a decree stating France would recognize Haitian independence but only at the price of 150 million francs - or around 10 times the amount the U.S. had paid for the Louisiana territory. The sum was meant to compensate the French colonists for their lost revenues from slavery. Baron de Mackau, whom Charles X sent to deliver the ordinance, arrived in Haiti in July, accompanied by a squadron of 14 brigs of war carrying more than 500 cannons. Rejection of the ordinance almost certainly meant war. This was not diplomacy. It was extortion. [...] [T]he total was more than 10 times Haiti’s annual budget. The rest of the world seemed to agree that the amount was absurd. [...] Forced to borrow 30 million francs from French banks to make the first two payments, it was hardly a surprise to anyone when Haiti defaulted soon thereafter. Still, the new French king sent another expedition in 1838 with 12 warships to force the Haitian president’s hand. [...] Although the colonists claimed that the indemnity would only cover one-twelfth the value of their lost properties, including the people they claimed as their slaves, the total amount of 90 million francs was actually five times France’s annual budget. [...] [R]esearchers have found that the independence debt [...] [was] directly responsible [...] for the underfunding of education in 20th-century Haiti, [...] lack of health care and [...] public infrastructure. [...] [T]he interest from all the loans [...] were not completely paid off until 1947 [...]. France belatedly abolished slavery in 1848 in its remaining colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guyana, which are still territories of France today. Afterwards, the French government demonstrated once again its understanding of slavery’s relationship to economics when it took it upon itself to financially compensate the former “owners” of enslaved people.
Text above by: Marlene Daut, “When France extorted Haiti - the greatest heist in history.” The Conversation (30 June 2020).
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The Slavery Abolition Act didn’t apply to India or Ceylon, and though it technically liberated over 800,000 British slaves in the Caribbean and Africa, all of them (excepting only small children) were forced to continue to labor as unpaid “apprentices” for a further six years, on pain of punishment. Under the terms of the act, they [...] remained their [masters’] “transferable property,” subject to punishment for “indolence,” “insolence,” or “insubordination.” So many black West Indians were jailed for resisting these outrageous terms that full emancipation was eventually brought forward to August 1, 1838. [...] A century on, the independence of most Caribbean colonies in the 1960s was followed by decades of racist British immigration policies that not only sought to prevent black West Indians from coming to the UK but eventually, under the Conservative governments of the past decade, ended up deliberately destroying the lives of thousands of lifelong legal residents by treating them as “illegal migrants.” In the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. Under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual budget - the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). Not until 2015 that debt finally paid off. This unprecedented compensation for injustice went not to those whose lives had been spent in slavery, nor even to those descended from the millions who had died in captivity. It was all given to British slaveowners, as restitution for the loss of their human property.
Text above by: Fara Dabhoiwala, “Speech and Slavery in the West Indies,” The New York Review (20 August 2020).
