#haitian history
I really hate it when fiction, when trying to be gritty and establish that their setting is free of frippery, or the land is super duper poor, etc, will say that the currency, rather than being gold or silver, is like ‘iron’ or ‘steel’ when like…
leaving aside the fact that iron rusts and such, it’s also… well, useful. You have better things to do with Iron then stuff it in a vault. Make shit out of it.
Gold? Pretty much only use for gold other then money (until we started using it in computer chips and stuff) is to sparkle. You can’t use it for much beyond a store of value.
There’s a reason why human society picked gold, and not something else.
I think they’re usually trying for a medieval-fantasy version of “bullets are currency”, seen in some post-apocalyptic settings.
And copper and bronze coins were used in Bronze Age societies, so there is a precedent for using the same thing for money as for making weapons and tools out of. (Copper and bronze are a lot easier to work than iron, though, so it’s easier to convert your currency into usable material.)
Apparently China sometimes used iron coins in place of copper, when copper was too expensive—like making ammunition with steel casings instead of brass.
Didn’t Sparta have iron currency?
Apparently that is either a fabrication or a legend, in Plutarch (he attributes the use of iron coins to Lycurgus but Lycurgus lived before Greece had any coins), or else someone, Plutarch or his source, misunderstanding “cooking spits” (obeloi) as “coins” (oboloi)—I think the words are related, and it’s possible that Spartans used cooking spits as a convenient unit of account given the communal feasts were central to their culture. Certainly, though, trading with others, Spartans used the same coins as the rest of Greece.
I would suspect Sparta’s main internal exchanges were barter, given the tightly controlled command economy; since almost every working person in Sparta was a slave (mostly state-owned helots but also privately-owned slaves like in the rest of Greece) or a free noncitizen protegee of one of the elite (Sparta’s only citizens were its nobles), there was no real need for a medium of exchange beyond the goods those slaves and protegees would give their elite masters and patrons, who could relatively conveniently just move the goods around among themselves.
The weird thing about the Spartan economy is it was illegal for the elite to have sources of revenue besides their state-allotted farmland, and an elite who could no longer afford to contribute to the aforementioned communal feasts was permanently stripped of status. (There was no way to rejoin the elite class, or otherwise enter it from outside, which meant its numbers permanently declined.)
Interesting. You learn something new every day, I guess.
That last bit about the elites seems like an extremely short-sighted system.
Oh, it was. One of the things that led to the downfall of sparta was how small the elite warrior class was getting. But the notion was to try to keep all the citizens equal to prevent like, class conflict or something within the elite that the slaves would take advantage of. So it came from a place that made sense.
We have to remember that in Sparta, the slave to citizen ratio was insane, like 7 to 1, according to Herodotus. You don’t get numbers like that anywhere else until the Carribean Sugar plantations. And given how it turned out for the French in Haiti, the Spartans were right to be paranoid about that.*
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*For reference, the Haitian revolution was presaged by a conflict within the white planter class against France that eventually cracked the system wide open and allowed the slaves to take over, winning legal freedom/citizenship within the French Republic (since this was happening at the same time as the French Revolution) in the process, and then later full on Independence thanks to Napoleon being a complete idiot about Haiti and L'Ouverture.
http://community-languages.org.uk/SCS-Papers/
Over 100 papers given at Society of Caribbean Studies conferences between 2000 and 2010 are now available online.
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Haitian Engineer Joseph Lemercier Laroche & Family Were The Only Black Passengers On The Titanic
Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche, the only passenger of known African ancestry who died on the Titanic, was born on May 26, 1889, in Cap Haiten, Haiti. He was the son of a white French army captain and a Haitian woman who was a descendant of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of independent Haiti. Laroche’s uncle, Dessalines M. Cincinnatus, was president of Haiti from 1911 to 1912.
Joseph…
Miss Haiti 2019 | Miss Universe 2019
Haitian Art
Lamour Fritzner
Port-au-Prince, Haïti c.1908
“I swear to maintain the integrity of our land and the independence of the Kingdom; to never allow, under any pretext, the return of Slavery nor of any feudal system contrary to liberty and the exercise of the civil and political rights of the people of Haiti.”
-King Henry Christophe
Haitian Food
Happy 251th birthday to Haitian King Henry Christophe, The True King of the North, builder of the Citadelle, born 06 October 1767.
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Baillargau Raymond, known as Ti Roro, was a Haitian drummer known for bringing the artistry of Haitian Vodou ritual drumming and other traditional Afro-Haitian drumming styles to the stage and to recording studios. He was an international performer who influenced jazz musicians, in particular, Max Roach.
#tiroro #Haitian #ayiti #haitienne #haitien #haitianfood #haititourism #haitienne #visithaiti #haiticherie #misshaiti #haitianbeauty #haitianbusinesses #haitianmusic #haitianblogger #haitianculture #haitianwomen #haitianqueens #haitianbelike #haitianaart #haitiancomedy
Bwa Kayiman | 14.08.1791
Bois Caïman (Haitian Creole: Bwa Kayiman) was the site of the Vodou ceremony during which the first major slave insurrection of the Haitian Revolution was planned.
On the night of August 14, 1791, representative slaves from nearby plantations gathered to participate in a secret ceremony conducted in the woods by nearby Le Cap in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Presided over by Dutty Boukman, a prominent slave leader and Vodou priest, the ceremony served as both a religious ritual and strategic meeting as conspirators met and planned a revolt against the ruling white planters of the colony’s wealthy Northern Plain. The ceremony is considered the official beginning of the Haitian Revolution.
In the following days, the whole Northern Plain was in flames, as the revolutionaries conducted acts of violence towards those who had formerly enslaved them. Clouded in mystery, many accounts of the catalytic ceremony and its particular details have varied. There are no known first-hand written accounts about what took place that night. It was first documented in the colonist Antoine Dalmas’s “History of the Saint-Domingue Revolution”, published in 1814.
#Haiti #Ayiti #Boukman #Bwakayiman #Haitian #HaitianHistory #Haitien #AyitiNouVleA
Haiti
