The recorded history of Haiti began in 1492, when the European captain and explorer Christopher Columbus landed on a large island in the region of the western Atlantic Ocean that later came to be known as the Caribbean Sea. The western portion of the island of Hispaniola, where Haiti is situated, was inhabited by Indigenous peoples, who called their island Ayiti. The island was promptly claimed for the Spanish Crown, where it was named La Isla Española ("the Spanish Island"), later Latinized to Hispaniola. By the early 17th century, the French had built a settlement on the west of Hispaniola and called it Saint-Domingue. Prior to the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), the economy of Saint-Domingue gradually expanded, with sugar and, later, coffee becoming important export crops. After the war which had disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid expansion. In 1767, it exported indigo, cotton and 72 million pounds of raw sugar. By the end of the century, the colony encompassed a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade.
In 1791, slaves staged a revolt which led to the Haitian Revolution. André Rigaud, leader of the revolution, forced the French to withdraw. When Toussaint Louverture declared independence in 1802, Napoleon sent an invasion force to coerce the Haitians. After the death of Toussaint while in imprisonment by the French, the Generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Alexandre Pétion laid heavy battle against Charles Leclerc, the leader of the French invasion. As the tide of the war turned in favor of the Haitians, Napoleon abandoned the invasion, which led to Dessalines declaring the independence of Haiti in 1804. Dessalines orchestrated a massacre of the remaining French population in Haiti, resulting in over 5,000 deaths. Men, women, and children were killed as revenge for Napoleon's invasion. Whites were hanged from gallows along the coast, signaling to passing ships that Haiti had purged itself of Europeans.
Soon after independence, Haiti was proclaimed an empire under Dessalines. When Dessalines was murdered, Haiti then divided off into two regions, controlled by rival regimes, with Christophe ruling the semi-feudal northern State of Haiti and Pétion ruling the more tolerant southern Republic of Haiti. Jean-Pierre Boyer succeeded Pétion in 1811; he consolidated power in the west, taking control of Santo Domingo and thereby unifying Hispaniola. However, the nation struggled economically due to indemnity payments beginning in 1825. In 1843, a revolt overthrew Boyer, plunging Haiti into instability marked by transient presidents until Faustin Soulouque took power in 1847, later declaring himself emperor (1849–1859) before being overthrown by Fabre Geffrard, who restored the republic. From the 1870s to 1890s, the National and Liberal parties competed for influence. Under the presidencies of Florvil Hyppolite and Tirésias Simon Sam, Haiti saw a rare period of stability lasting until the early 20th-century.
Haiti was occupied by the United States from 1915 to 1934. After the occupation, President Sténio Vincent forced through a new constitution that allowed for sweeping powers for the executive branch. The first civilian president, Dumarsais Estimé, ruled for five years until 1950. After a brief period of instability, François Duvalier rose to prominence and painted himself as the legitimate heir to Estimé. His regime is regarded as one of the most repressive and corrupt of modern times; his son, Jean-Claude, saw Haiti's economic and political condition continue to decline, although some of the more fearsome elements of his father's regime were abolished. The period after Duvalier was dominated by the presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide until his downfall in the controversial 2004 coup d'état. A major 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit the country in 2010 and caused widespread devastation.
Pre-Spanish history
Successive waves of Arawakan-speaking migrants, moving northward from the Orinoco delta in South America, settled the islands of the Caribbean. Around 600 AD, the Taíno, an Arawak culture, arrived on the island, displacing the previous inhabitants, however this view is widely disputed. They were organized into cacicazgos (chiefdoms), each led by a cacique (chief).
According to the Puerto Rican historian Cayetano Coll y Toste, the German explorer Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius was the first person to describe the Indigenous peoples of Haiti as "Taini" (Taino). The archaeologist L. Antonio Curet has written that von Martius described these peoples as "Taini...perhaps by mistaking the qualifier for an ethnonym".
Spanish history (1492–1625)
Christopher Columbus established the settlement, La Navidad, near the modern town of Cap-Haïtien. It was built from the timbers of his wrecked ship, the Santa María, during his first voyage in December 1492. When he returned in 1493 on his second voyage he found the settlement had been destroyed and all 39 settlers killed. Columbus continued east and founded a new settlement at La Isabela on the territory of the present-day Dominican Republic in 1493. The capital of the colony was moved to Santo Domingo in 1496, on the southwest coast of the island, also in the territory of the present-day Dominican Republic. The Spanish returned to western Hispaniola in 1502, establishing a settlement at Yaguana, near modern-day Léogâne. A second settlement was established on the north coast in 1504 called Puerto Real, near modern Fort-Liberté – which in 1578 was relocated to a nearby site and renamed Bayaja.
Following the arrival of Europeans, La Hispaniola's Indigenous population was nearly extinguished, in possibly the worst case of depopulation in the Americas. A commonly accepted hypothesis attributes the high mortality of this colony in part to European diseases to which the natives had no immunity. There is still heated debate over the population of Indigenous people on the island of Hispaniola in 1492 just prior to European arrival, but estimates range from no more than a few tens of thousands, according to a 2020 genetic analysis, to upwards of 750,000. The Indigenous population declined by up to 95% in the century after the Spanish arrival,S, Rosenbaum S. Alan. Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2018. Page 302,313. to a few thousand left. Many authors have described the treatment of the Indigenous peoples in Hispaniola under the Spanish Empire as genocide. Multiple sources: Sheri P. Rosenberg, "Genocide Is a Process, Not an Event," Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, 1 (April 2012): 16–23. © 2012 Genocide Studies and Prevention. doi: 10.3138/gsp.7.1.16 David Moshman (2007) Us and Them: Identity and Genocide, Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 7:2, p. 125, DOI: 10.1080/15283480701326034, Alexander Laban Hinton, "Critical Genocide Studies," Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, 1 (April 2012): 4–15. © 2012 Genocide Studies and Prevention. doi: 10.3138/gsp.7.1.4, p. 11 Keegan, William F., "Destruction of the Taino" in Archaeology. January/February 1992, pp. 51–56. Grenke, Arthur. God, greed, and genocide: The Holocaust through the centuries. New Academia Publishing, LLC, 2005. pp. 141–143, 200. Rosenbaum, Alan S. Is the Holocaust unique?: perspectives on comparative genocide. Routledge, 2018. p. 302. Donald Bloxham, A. Dirk Moses, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, OXFORD UNIVERSITY press, 2010, p. 310. Norman M Naimark, Genocide a world history, OXFORD UNIVERSITY press, 2017, p. 39. Jones, Adam. 2006. Genocide: a comprehensive introduction. London: Routledge. pp. 108–111.
A small number of Taínos were able to survive and set up villages elsewhere. Spanish interest in Hispaniola began to wane in the 1520s, as more lucrative gold and silver deposits were found in Mexico and South America. Thereafter, the population of Spanish Hispaniola grew at a slow pace.
The settlement of Yaguana was burnt to the ground three times in its just over a century-long existence as a Spanish settlement, first by French pirates in 1543, again on 27 May 1592; by a 110-strong landing party from a four-ship English naval squadron led by Christopher Newport in his flagship Golden Dragon, who destroyed all 150 houses in the settlement; and finally by the Spanish themselves in 1605, for reasons set out below.Historic Cities of the Americas: An Illustrated Encyclopedia (2005). David Marley. Page 121
In 1595, the Spanish, frustrated by the twenty-year rebellion of their Dutch subjects, closed their home ports to rebel shipping from the Netherlands, cutting them off from the critical salt supplies necessary for their herring industry. The Dutch responded by sourcing new salt supplies from Spanish America, where colonists were more-than-happy to trade. Large numbers of Dutch traders/pirates joined their English and French brethren trading on the remote coasts of Hispaniola. In 1605, Spain was infuriated that Spanish settlements on the northern and western coasts of the island persisted in carrying out large-scale and illegal trade with the Dutch, who were at that time fighting a war of independence against Spain in Europe, and the English, a very recent enemy state, and so decided to forcibly resettle their inhabitants closer to the city of Santo Domingo.Knight, Franklin, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 3rd ed. p. 54 New York, Oxford University Press 1990. This action, known as the Devastaciones de Osorio, proved disastrous for the colonists; more than half of the resettled colonists died of starvation or disease, over 100,000 cattle were abandoned, and many slaves escaped.Rough Guide to the Dominican Republic, p. 352. Five of the existing thirteen settlements on the island were brutally razed by Spanish troops, including the two settlements on the territory of present-day Haiti, La Yaguana and Bayaja. Many of the inhabitants fought, escaped to the jungle, or fled to the safety of passing Dutch ships.Peasants and Religion: A Socioeconomic Study of Dios Olivorio and the Palma Sola Movement in the Dominican Republic. Jan Lundius & Mats Lundah. Routledge 2000, p. 397.
This Spanish action was counterproductive as English, Dutch, and French pirates were now free to establish bases on the island's abandoned northern and western coasts, where wild cattle were now plentiful and free. In 1697, after decades of fighting over the territory, the Spanish ceded the western part of the island to the French, who henceforth called it Saint-Domingue. Saint-Domingue developed into a highly lucrative colony for France. Its economy was based on a labor-intensive sugar industry, which depended on vast numbers of West African slaves. Meanwhile, the situation on the Spanish part of the island deteriorated. The entire Spanish empire sank into a deep economic crisis, and Santo Domingo was in addition struck by earthquakes, hurricanes, and a shrinking population.
French Saint-Domingue (1625–1789)
Early French Saint-Domingue (1625–1711) The French built a settlement on the west coast of Hispaniola, which was known as 'the most fertile part of the West Indies'. Prior to gaining its independence in 1804, Haiti was the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Under French rule, Saint-Domingue grew to be the wealthiest colony in the French empire and, perhaps, the richest colony in the world. Shortly before the Haitian Revolution, Saint-Domingue produced roughly 40 percent of the sugar and 60 percent of the coffee imported to Europe.