Saint-Domingue
생도맹그
The French colony on the western third of Hispaniola from 1659 to 1804, today's Haiti. Spain recognised French rule in the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697, and in the eighteenth century sugar and coffee plantations worked by enslaved Africans made it the "Pearl of the Antilles", France's richest colony. The Haitian Revolution that began with the slave rising of 1791 ended with its independence as Haiti on 1 January 1804.
In depth
French buccaneers settled on Tortuga in 1625, and the settlement was officially established under a commission of Louis XIV in 1659. Spain tacitly recognised the French presence in the western third of the island in the Peace of Ryswick of 1697. After the Seven Years' War the colony expanded rapidly: in 1767 it exported 72 million pounds of raw sugar, 51 million pounds of refined sugar, a million pounds of indigo and two million pounds of cotton, and by the 1780s it produced about 40 percent of the sugar and 60 percent of the coffee consumed in Europe. By 1789 some 8,000 plantations produced half of all the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the Americas, and this colony roughly the size of Hawaiʻi or Belgium produced more of both than all the British West Indies combined. An estimated 790,000 to 860,000 slaves were brought in between 1681 and 1791, a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade in 1783–1791, and from 1787 more than 30,000 a year. Tropical disease and the conditions of slavery prevented natural increase, so that a majority of the slaves were always African-born. Sugar plantations occupied only 14 percent of cultivated land but employed 300 slaves on average and 1,400 at the largest, while coffee took up 50 percent of the land.
Around 1789 the population was 40,000–45,000 whites, 28,000–32,000 free people of colour and 406,000–465,000 slaves. The whites were divided between a small group of grands blancs, most of whom lived in France, and the petits blancs, artisans, small traders and overseers; the free people of colour, the largest and wealthiest such population in the Caribbean, owned a third of the plantation property and a quarter of the slaves by 1789 and held a near monopoly of coffee planting. From the 1760s, however, the Bourbon authorities subjected them to discriminatory statutes forbidding certain professions, European clothing and the carrying of arms in public. The slave rising that began with the ceremony at Bois Caïman in August 1791 led to the abolition of slavery in 1793 and its confirmation by the Convention in 1794, and under Toussaint Louverture France controlled the whole island from 1795 to 1802. When the Leclerc expedition of 1802 provoked a new rising, the French withdrew at the end of 1803, and the colony declared its independence as Haiti, from the Taíno name of the island, in 1804.