Haiti: Colonial Period

Spain claimed the island of Hispaniola following Columbus's arrival in 1492, but by the seventeenth century French buccaneers and settlers had established a foothold on its western third. Spain formally ceded this territory to France under the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, creating the colony that became known as Saint-Domingue.

Under French administration, Saint-Domingue grew into one of the wealthiest colonies in the world, producing large shares of the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe by the late eighteenth century. This prosperity rested on a plantation economy sustained by the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, alongside a rigid social hierarchy that separated European colonists, free people of color, and the enslaved majority.

The stark inequalities of colonial society, combined with ideals unleashed by the French Revolution, helped ignite a sustained uprising beginning in 1791. After more than a decade of conflict, the colony's inhabitants declared independence in 1804, establishing Haiti as the first nation in the Americas to abolish slavery and the first Black-led republic in the world.