Investigating U.S. Imperialism in Haiti through its Railways, 1909-1934
Home > Investigating U.S. Imperialism in Haiti through its Railways, 1909-1934
In this post, Georgia Davison of the University of Cambridge writes about how the Economic History Society’s Research Fund for Graduate Students helped her fund trips to the archives for her MPhil dissertation.
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In January 2025 I embarked on a research trip to the United States to undertake archival research for the dissertation element of my MPhil in World History at the University of Cambridge. This trip was possible thanks to a research grant for graduate students from the Economic History Society, and invaluable to my research. My dissertation focuses on how U.S. imperialism was articulated through railway concessions before and during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). I spent one week at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, to study State Department records. I then travelled to New York City to examine the collections of the New York Public Library, specifically the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This trip formed the archival basis of my dissertation, allowing me to construct case studies around the Plain du Cul-de-Sac railway and the National Railroad of Haiti.
My purpose in studying Haiti’s railways specifically was two-fold: the first motivation was tracing the history of several railway concessions during this period to investigate the influence of private American capitalists on the various political bodies involved. The second was to use the railways as a framing device for the spread of U.S. financial influence across Haiti. Railways are inherently a physical manifestation of networks of the movement of people, goods, and money, and I found that of the several disparate actors, events and policies I was investigating during my archival research were connected to each other by the railways.
It became apparent to me early on that the time frame of this project would span the lead up to the U.S. Occupation of Haiti and the Occupation itself, as progress on the U.S.-owned railways kicked off in earnest in 1910. There is a thorough body of scholarship on various aspects of the U.S. occupation in Haiti, but fewer who concentrate on the period before the arrival of the Marines, or who deal with that transition from pre-intervention to Occupation. I found that there were a lot of archival sources which hadn’t been used previously which demonstrate a deeper, quite insidious entanglement of private U.S. businessmen in the US and Haitian governments than has been previously understood.
The main themes of my project include the erasure of Haitian discontent in State Department correspondence, as politicians and capitalists were convinced that Haiti’s small German population was working behind the scenes to cause as many difficulties as possible for Americans in Haiti; the ever-increasing machinations of U.S. capitalists to persuade the State Department to stage an intervention in Haiti several years before this came to fruition; and the role of the railway in the agrarian state-building that the occupation attempted, whilst inflicting physical, economic, and cultural acts of violence on the Haitian people.
The archival footprint of this dissertation tells a story of characters. Politicians and capitalists loom large in the twists and turns of Haiti’s railway history. Yet it was those who went unheard and unseen who were impacted by the disagreements, machinations and goals of these men. They were the farmers whose land was damaged by the construction of the railway. They were the children who would eagerly await the train arriving in Gonaïves on a Sunday afternoon, greeting their friends and family returning from a holiday inland. They were the sixty people who lost their lives in the Thor railway disaster on the day of their Patron Saint, and whose family members’ anguish was seen by railway executives as an opportunity to renegotiate their contract to their own benefit. These are the people who barely appear, if at all, in the archives.
This dissertation is a small piece of a larger puzzle studying the transnational flows of racialised imperialism and capital. The history of Haiti’s railways links to other histories of infrastructural imperialism across the globe, as well as connecting Haiti more deeply to the movements of foreign capital, exports and U.S. influence across Latin America. Haiti’s railways were not conceived in a vacuum, but were fundamentally a response to U.S. capitalists viewing Latin America as an emerging market from which they could profit whilst maintaining a racist worldview. The National Railroad and the Cul-de-Sac railway may have been built in Haiti, but they were never built for Haiti.
My thanks again to the Economic History Society for their research grant, which made this dissertation possible.
To contact the author:
Georgia Davison
University of Cambridge
