‘Hayti is not a civilized country’, observed the provisional president Boisrond Canal in 1902 when discussing with the British Minister in Port-au-Prince a case of police brutality towards a British subject. Canal was speaking as a member of the educated, francophile, mulatto elite, who generally despised the great mass of black citizens whose customs they regarded as barbarous and primitive.

Haiti, which had become the first independent country of Latin America in 1804, was from the outset plagued by deep social and political divisions. While Haitians of all colours saw their defeat of the French colonists as a vindication of the African race, tensions between blacks and mulattos frequently manifested themselves in the new nation. The majority of blacks were descendants of the 450,000 slaves of the colonial period while the mulatto families mostly went back to the small but significant group of affranchis or free coloureds. With independence, some of the former slaves had managed to secure small properties, particularly in the north, either as a result of grants or sales of land by the government or by squatting on vacant lands, but the general effect of the early land reforms had been to strengthen the position of the mulattos as the principal landowners of the country.

During the eighteenth century Haiti (Saint Domingue) had been the world's leading producer of sugar, but the fragmentation of the great estates together with the destruction wrought in the revolutionary years led to a dramatic decline in sugar production. Coffee in fact became independent Haiti's main export crop.