Haiti historical timeline

Origins

The Taíno had lived on Hispaniola for centuries when Christopher Columbus landed in 1492. Spanish settlement destroyed them within fifty years, and Spain then largely abandoned the western end of the island to French buccaneers, ceding it formally in 1697. As Saint-Domingue, it became the most profitable colony on earth, producing a large share of the world’s sugar and coffee on the labour of around half a million enslaved Africans, worked under conditions so lethal that the population had to be constantly replaced.

Turning points

In August 1791 that population rose. Over thirteen years it defeated the colonial militia, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition and finally Napoleon’s army, and on 1 January 1804 declared independence as Haiti — the only time in history a slave revolt produced a state. The price was set in 1825, when France sent warships and demanded 150 million francs in compensation for its lost property, including the people; Haiti paid off that debt and the loans taken to service it over roughly a century, at ruinous cost. The United States occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. The Duvaliers, father and son, ruled from 1957 to 1986 through the Tontons Macoute. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected in 1990, deposed, restored and deposed again. The 2010 earthquake killed well over a hundred thousand people, and the assassination of the president in 2021 was followed by the collapse of state authority across much of the country.

Influential people

Toussaint Louverture, who turned a revolt into an army and a colony into a polity, and died in a French prison. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who declared independence. Henri Christophe, who crowned himself king in the north and built the Citadelle. And Jacques Roumain and René Depestre in literature.

Cultural evolution

Haitian Creole, built from French vocabulary on West African grammar, is spoken by everyone and has been an official language since 1987. Vodou fused Dahomean and Kongo religion with Catholicism and survived every attempt to suppress it. Painting, particularly the Cap-Haïtien and Saint-Soleil schools, found an international market in the twentieth century.

Present-day significance

Haiti’s revolution frightened every slaveholding power in the Atlantic and is a founding event of modern anti-colonial politics, which is precisely why it was punished so thoroughly. The country today faces gang control of much of the capital, a humanitarian emergency and an unresolved question of political legitimacy.