Conclusion
In this brief essay, I have given an overview of Edmond Paul’s life and work. I hope to have satisfied those readers who just wanted to know a little more about this historical figure, while provoking the curiosity of others. For those who decide to dive in further, I hope they will find it useful as a reference, and I trust they will understand that this is a preliminary synthesis, based on a first glance at a lot of material. I count on their further research and debate to help improve this account while expanding the questions we ask about Edmond Paul.
To get the conversation going, I propose five directions in which further research could be fruitful. First, we need a more contextualized understanding of Edmond Paul as a thinker. He was part of a group that represented specific interests and sometimes used violence; many people disagreed with him. While his political battles are well known, it would be important to pay more attention to his in-depth intellectual debates, such as his exchanges with Monfleury and Thoby, as well as his response to Gustave de Molinari, the Belgian proponent of free trade who was based in France at the time.130 In these discussions, Paul is unmistakably rooted in the “Other Canon” tradition of economics, which was still mainly European at the time, while contributing to it from a distinctly Haitian post-colonial and anti-racist perspective.131 A closer reading in this light would be a welcome addition to the thriving contemporary scholarship – such as the work of Marlene Daut, Chelsea Stieber, and Jared Holley – that seeks to restore an appreciation for Haiti’s role in transatlantic intellectual history.132 Indeed, considering that much of Paul’s work was published in Paris, and some of it was reviewed in the Parisian Revue des économistes, it would be interesting to reconstruct how and to what extent his ideas reverberated in or through Europe, even as he mainly addressed a Haitian audience.
Second, the fact that the New York Times lists some of his bibliography,133 and that a later generation of Haitian exiles was surprised to find books by Edmond Paul in Mexican libraries,134 suggests that his influence was significant on Haiti’s side of the Atlantic as well. It would be relevant to investigate to what degree his ideas were known in the region, including how they spread and how they were received.135 It would also be worthwhile to pay closer attention to the regional events and conversations that may have influenced Paul’s thought.136 Caribbean societies would be especially worthy of attention, given that Edmond Paul published some of his works from Jamaica, where he and other members of his political party lived at various times (alternating with their enemies, who perhaps also read and discussed him), while others who espoused his ideology were dispersed throughout the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Saint Thomas, and Turks and Caicos (as well as France).137 Meanwhile, Anténor Firmin, who fully endorsed Paul’s economic ideas, was involved in the Antillean Confederation.138 These networks could be an interesting starting point from which to expand on the work of Matthew J. Smith, who has explored what the Haitian presence in Jamaica (and vice versa) meant to both Haitians and Jamaicans in Paul’s time.139
Third, Edmond Paul’s story is inseparable from the story of Haiti’s 19th-century; each of these stories can deepen our understanding of the other. Jean Casimir, Laurent Dubois, and Johnhenry Gonzalez have argued that the main event of 19th-century Haiti is the consolidation of the “counter-plantation system”.140 On the one hand, we could interpret Edmond Paul’s rural policy proposals as an illustration of the state-elite resistance to this process.141 However, given his sympathetic interest in the living conditions of peasants,142 along with his arguments about freeing them from exploitation through policy changes that take into account the interrelatedness of agriculture, urban industry, and the state,143 perhaps Edmond Paul can instead help us to complicate that narrative with a more nuanced understanding of the creative tensions that were at stake at the time. If coffee had been the solution that allowed the counter-plantation system to survive in a postcolonial Caribbean context that required some engagement with global markets (and militaries),144 Edmond Paul warned that this formula was no longer viable in the changing circumstances, and one could argue that his proposals were at least in part meant to renew the conditions for the possibility of a sovereign peasantry. In any case, Edmond Paul’s approach to these questions differed greatly from most of his contemporaries’,145 and that in itself should invite a finer-grained reading.
Fourth, Edmond Paul’s industrial policy proposal, which was approved by the House of Representatives, could have marked a major turning point in Haitian economic history146 had it not been killed by opposition in the Senate. It would be worth studying the political economy of this moment (1877-1878) further, with attention to the various actors involved, the interests they represented, the ideas they held, and their relationships with each other.147 This would not only shed light on a crucial moment in Haitian history, but on later stages as well, such as the neoliberal reforms that began in the 1980s, when new actors rehearsed century-old debates.148 A deeper understanding of the tension in Paul’s agenda between promoting industrialization and promoting institutionality, and the way this tension played out, may also be pertinent to today’s debates about what a country needs to “get right” first in order to achieve economic and political stability.149
Finally, Edmond Paul could provide a valuable window into the role of elites in Haiti’s political economy more generally. His embeddedness in a privileged family and a major political party, combined with his impact as a policymaker, make the case study pertinent. There is a wealth of documentation available, not only about Edmond Paul’s own networks,150 but also about his father’s and even his paternal grandfather’s.151 The ability to trace this prominent political family’s relations in such detail across the nineteenth century represents an opportunity for researchers interested in elites to expand on the work of, for example, Vertus Saint-Louis, Alex Dupuy, Michel Soukar, Brenda Gayle Plummer and Omar Ribeiro Thomaz.152
Surely, there are many more questions that would be worth asking about Edmond Paul. We now have unprecedented (if not yet complete) access to his original texts, which should enable researchers to dig into some of these issues. The bibliography that follows can serve as a reference.
