Rubber, War, Revolution: The SHADA Experimentand 1940s Haiti

Abstract

This paper is based in large part on access to the previously little used archive of Thomas A. Fennell, President and General-Manager of the Société Haïtiano-Américaine de Développement Agricole (SHADA). Fennell’s carefully organized papers outline in incredible detail the workings of perhaps the most ambitious agricultural program undertaken in twentieth-century Haiti. The story of that program, its origins, and the reasons for its collapse, are the subject of the present work and all references to the archive are cited as “Fennell Papers.” I am indebted to the late Dr. Thomas Dudley Fennell, son of Thomas A. Fennell, for generously sharing a portion of the archive with me and for his active correspondence on early ideas that are developed here. I also thank his son, Jeffrey Fennell, for entrusting me with documents from his father’s and grandfather’s collections which have not only enrichened my knowledge of the history of SHADA, but also caused me to reassess arguments I made on the project in earlier work. I am also grateful to the late Mark R. Finlay with whom I was in touch while he worked on his history of US Rubber projects, and who also graciously shared important documents used in this essay. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the University of Oxford and the University of Liverpool. I thank the audiences who engaged with me for their feedback.