Funny you should mention that. My mother was an ardent CP-GB member in the 40s and 50s and persuaded her mother to burn her share certificates in Baku Oil on the grounds the revolution would never pay out and it was a capitalist evil.
In the 1960s, There was a partial rapprochement with the west and the USSR paid out holders of shares in Baku Oil fields, if they could produce the paperwork...
Ya know it sounds funny but it seems to me that it is a fundamental principle they the larger a body of humans under consideration is, the slower everything will move. For example a small startup with 15 developers often is able to add features and move faster to capture a market than a massive lumbering blue behemoth.
Thus if we were to reframe our understanding of timelines considering organization size.
Less than a few hundred people could be measured in time scales of a few weeks.
Large organizations with thousands of people change and move on time scales of years or decades.
Then understandably nations would often move on the time scales of centuries to do things, simply because of inertial forces.
I wonder how much of the discontent and mudslinging that now happens is a result of everything in our personal lives suddenly becoming faster without the rest of the human organizations surrounding it being able to speed up as well.
It's not all that funny, considering that the reason they were paying those reparations was the 'damages' inflicted upon French slaveowners by slaves freeing themselves.
It was all damages - lost property (land and slaves), deaths, lost profits, etc. It was a terrible but necessary sacrifice on the part of Haiti because it was the only way France would recognise their independence, which paved the way for other countries to do the same (but nobody was forthcoming on their own either out of fear of pissing of France or their own slaves/colonies rebelling).
France required compensation money in exchange for recognition of Haiti (which was Haiti's only choice at the time, nobody else wanted to recognise them). Because of course Haiti didn't have the money nor any realistic prospects of coming up with the money soon (not only was their infrastructure decimated by the slave revolts and civil war and revolution and various campaigns, their cash crops were only viable with slave labour, so unviable in the free Haiti), French banks provided loans at exorbitant rates to pay France. Those loans were the ones that Haiti was still paying, to French banks, not France the country. Banks have zero interest of forgiving loans, regardless of ethics, so it's not at all surprising they never did.
consider that some countries have a larger bureaucracy/democracy than others, it may be that dictatorships with few people in thr actual inner circle of power can adapt faster than those countries that have to persuade their constituency and find consensus before making a move.
Well yeah, there's no doubt that dictatorships/autocracies are faster at implementing bad ideas. That's the whole point of democracies/bureaucracies: to have a chance to weed out the obviously bad ideas before people are harmed.
In the 1960s, There was a partial rapprochement with the west and the USSR paid out holders of shares in Baku Oil fields, if they could produce the paperwork...