The native Taino – who inhabited the island of Hispaniola when Christopher Columbus first landed on it in 1492 – were virtually wiped out by Spanish settlers within 25 years. In the early 17th century, the French established a presence on Hispaniola. In 1697, Spain ceded to the French the western third of the island, which later became Haiti. The French colony, based on forestry and sugar-related industries, became one of the wealthiest in the Caribbean but relied heavily on the forced labor of enslaved Africans and environmentally degrading practices. In the late 18th century, Toussaint L’ouverture led a revolution of Haiti’s nearly half a million slaves that ended France’s rule on the island. After a prolonged struggle, and under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti became the first country in the world led by former slaves after declaring its independence in 1804, but it was forced to pay an indemnity of 100 million francs (equivalent to $22 billion USD in March 2023) to France for more than a century and was shunned by other countries for nearly 40 years. On July 12, 1862, the US officially recognized Haiti, but foreign economic influence and internal political instability induced the US to occupy Haiti from 1915-1934. Subsequently, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and then his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier led repressive and corrupt regimes that ruled Haiti in 1957-1971 and 1971-1986, respectively. President Jovenel Moise was assassinated on July 7, 2021, leading the country further into an extra-constitutional governance structure and contributing to the country’s growing fragility. On July 20, 2021, the Government of Haiti installed Ariel Henry – whom President Moise had nominated shortly before his death – as prime minister. As of March 2023, Haiti had no sitting elected officials. The country has long been plagued by natural disasters. In January 2010, a major 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti with an epicenter about 25 km (15 mi) west of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Estimates are that over 300,000 people were killed and some 1.5 million left homeless. The earthquake was assessed as the worst in this region over the last 200 years. A 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti’s southern peninsula in August 2021, causing well over 2,000 deaths; an estimated 500,000 required emergency humanitarian aid. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, as well as one of the most unequal in wealth distribution.
Economy
Small Caribbean island economy and OECS-member state; extreme poverty and inflation; enormous income inequality; ongoing civil unrest due to recent presidential assassination; US preferential market access; very open to foreign direct investment
Population
The population is 11,470,261 (2023 est.) which consists of Black 95%, mixed and White 5%.
The Haitian Revolution was a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti. The revolt began on August 22, 1791, and ended in 1804 with the former colony’s independence. It involved black, biracial, French, Spanish, British, and Polish participants—with the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerging as Haiti’s most prominent general. The revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery (though not from forced labor) and ruled by non-whites and former captives. The successful revolution was a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World and the revolution’s effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms the former slaves had won, and with the collaboration of already free people of color, of their independence from white Europeans.
The revolution was the largest slave uprising since Spartacus‘ unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier, and challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged black inferiority and about slaves’ ability to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels’ organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners in the hemisphere.
Compared to other Atlantic revolutions, the events in Haiti have received comparatively little public attention in retrospect: historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot characterizes the historiography of the Haitian Revolution as being “silenced” by that of the French Revolution.
Much of Caribbean economic development in the 18th century was contingent on Europeans’ demand for sugar. Plantation owners produced sugar as a commodity crop from cultivation of sugarcane, which required extensive labor. The colony of Saint-Domingue also had extensive coffee, cocoa, and indigo plantations, but these were smaller and less profitable than the sugar plantations. The commodity crops were traded for European goods.
Starting in the 1730s, French engineers constructed complex irrigation systems to increase sugarcane production. By the 1740s, Saint-Domingue, together with the British colony of Jamaica, had become the main suppliers of the world’s sugar. Production of sugar depended on extensive manual labor provided by enslaved Africans. An average of 600 ships engaged every year in shipping products from Saint-Domingue to Bordeaux, and the value of the colony’s crops and goods was almost equal in value to all of the products shipped from the Thirteen Colonies to Great Britain. The livelihood of 1 million of the approximately 25 million people who lived in France in 1789 depended directly upon the agricultural imports from Saint-Domingue, and several million indirectly depended upon trade from the colony to maintain their standard of living. Saint-Domingue was the most profitable French colony in the world, indeed one of the most profitable of all the European colonies in the 18th century.
Slavery sustained sugar production under harsh conditions; diseases such as malaria (brought from Africa) and yellow fever caused high mortality, thriving in the tropical Caribbean climate. In 1787 alone, the French imported about 20,000 slaves from Africa into Saint-Domingue, while the British imported about 38,000 slaves total to all of their Caribbean colonies. The death rate from yellow fever was such that at least 50% of the slaves from Africa died within a year of arriving, so while the white planters preferred to work their slaves as hard as possible, providing them only the bare minimum of food and shelter, they calculated that it was better to get the most work out of their slaves with the lowest expense possible, since they were probably going to die of yellow fever anyway.[18] The death rate was so high that polyandry—one woman being married to several men at the same time—developed as a common form of marriage among the slaves.] As slaves had no legal rights, rape by planters, their unmarried sons, or overseers was a common occurrence on the plantations.
Saint-Domingue was a place of intense racial tension, with frequent violent clashes between white colonists and black slaves. The French historian Paul Fregosi described the situation as follows: “Whites, mulattos and blacks loathed each other”
“Whites, mulattos and blacks loathed each other. The poor whites couldn’t stand the rich whites, the rich whites despised the poor whites, the middle-class whites were jealous of the aristocratic whites, the whites born in France looked down upon the locally born whites, mulattoes envied the whites, despised the blacks and were despised by the whites; free Negroes brutalized those who were still slaves, Haitian born blacks regarded those from Africa as savages. Everyone—quite rightly—lived in terror of everyone else. …Haiti was hell, but Haiti was rich”.
— The French historian Paul Fregosi
During the colonial era, many slaves who had escaped from plantations in Saint-Domingue were called maroons. They hid on the margins of large plantations, living off the land and what they could steal from their former masters. Others fled to towns, to blend in with urban slaves and freed blacks who often migrated to those areas for work. If caught, these runaway slaves would be severely and violently punished. However, some masters tolerated petit marronages, or short-term absences from plantations, knowing these allowed release of tensions.
Many runaway slaves in Saint-Domingue lived in the hillside woods, away from white control. These groups often conducted violent raids on the island’s sugar and coffee plantations. Although the numbers in these bands grew large (sometimes into the thousands), they generally lacked the leadership and strategy to accomplish large-scale objectives. The first effective maroon leader to emerge was François Mackandal, a Haitian Vodou priest who inspired his people by drawing on African traditions and religions. He united the maroon bands and established a network of secret organizations among plantation slaves, leading a rebellion from 1751 through 1757. Although Mackandal was captured by the French and burned at the stake in 1758, large armed maroon bands persisted in raids and harassment after his death
Guillaume Raynal, a French writer, criticized slavery in his history of European colonization. He warned that “the Africans only want a chief, sufficiently courageous, to lead them on to vengeance and slaughter” . Raynal’s Enlightenment philosophy went deeper than a prediction and reflected many similar philosophies, including those of Rousseau and Diderot. Raynal’s admonition was written thirteen years before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which highlighted freedom and liberty but did not abolish slavery.
Toussaint Louverture, a free black who was familiar with Enlightenment ideas within the context of European colonialism, became a key “enlightened actor” in the Haitian Revolution. Enlightened thought divided the world into “enlightened leaders” and “ignorant masses”; Louverture sought to bridge this divide between the popular masses and the enlightened few by striking a balance between Western Enlightened thought as a necessary means of winning liberation, and not propagating the notion that it was morally superior to the experiences and knowledge of people of color on Saint-Domingue. Louverture wrote a constitution for a new society in Saint-Domingue that abolished slavery. The existence of slavery in Enlightened society was an incongruity that had been left unaddressed by European scholars prior to the French Revolution. Louverture took on this inconsistency directly in his constitution. In addition, he exhibited a connection to Enlightenment scholars through the style, language, and accent of this text.