A relatively minor actor in today’s global economy, Haiti played a central role as an exporter of tropical products and an importer of African slaves during the eighteenth century.
Little is known of the native population of Haiti, the Tainos, most of whom died during the decades following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World (1492). The Spaniards exported small amounts of gold and Mesoamerican Indian slaves, but Haiti did not become a major trade partner until the French took over the western third of Hispaniola, which they renamed Saint Domingue, following the Treaty of Ryswick (1697).
The French imported a total of 1.7 million African slaves to their various Caribbean possessions between the 1650s and the 1830s. By 1790, 500,000 slaves of African origin lived in Saint Domingue alone. Slaves not employed as house servants worked as field hands producing tropical products for the European market, most notably sugar, cotton, coffee, cocoa, and indigo. So large were the colony’s exports that they represented two-thirds of France’s foreign trade; half of Europe’s consumption of tropical products originated in Saint Domingue.
In keeping with the then-dominant mercantilism, the French strictly controlled trade to and from Saint Domingue under a system known as the exclusif. Saint Domingue specialized in raw materials and foodstuffs, exported all its production to France, and imported all its needs, including slaves, foodstuffs, luxury products, and manufactured goods from France or from French merchants. Despite these trade restrictions and the scarcity of cash, smugglers traded with non-French ports, particularly Boston, to which planters sent molasses in exchange for the dried fish they fed their slaves.
The many contacts involved in the slave trade and the production of export crops had a great political and cultural impact on Haitian history. Deeply resentful of the exclusif, white slave owners initially viewed breaking away from the French colony, along the lines of the American Revolution, with interest. Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, free men of mixed black and white ancestry, known as mulâtres (mulattoes), also supported independence, hoping that the revolutionary call for equality and fraternity would put an end to the legal racial discrimination under which they suffered. Slaves forcibly imported from Africa, who outnumbered free whites and mulattoes ten to one, eventually launched a revolt in August 1791. After twelve years of fighting, slaves gained their freedom and Saint Domingue, renamed Haiti, became independent in 1804.
Postindependence trade rapidly dwindled, as former slaves shunned plantation work and opted for small-scale subsistence farming instead. Political instability and land erosion further diminished Haitian exports, while slave imports disappeared. As of 2000, Haiti’s imports, a mere $1 billion, were four times as large as its exports.
The cultural and racial legacy of eighteenth-century trade proved more lasting, and the mixing of African and French traditions is a characteristic of contemporary Haitian society. The main religions are Catholicism and Voodoo (a religion incorporating gods and saints from the Catholic and African pantheons). The main languages are French and Creole (a language based on French and African dialects). Racially, Haiti remains divided between a black majority (90 percent) and a mulatto minority of mixed European and African ancestry (10 percent).
Philippe R. Girard
See also: French Empire; French Revolution; Slavery.
Heinl, Robert, Nancy Heinl, and Michael Heinl. Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996.