Haiti’s “Double Debt”

This past weekend, the New York Times published a series that had been in the making for over a year. The Ransom looks into the history of Haiti’s historical and contemporary realities, and the immense role the “double debt” to France played. The project is published in English, French, and Kreyòl. This series also offers up a detailed bibliography of their sources and methods of research (found here), including work by UWM Professor Emeritus Patrick Bellegarde-Smith. A full data set of Haiti’s payments is posted on GitHub, along with documentation for the data and the sources behind it. According to one of the authors, “Many historians told us no one had carefully calculated the double debt before and that our research was breaking new academic ground. So, we decided to publish our raw data, collected from many sources, in both an effort of transparency and a sincere hope that it will boost further research on the topic.” Find the GitHub data set here. NYT has published project reactions and updates, here.