Saint-Domingue
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Categories: Former countries in North America | Former colonies of France | Former monarchies of North America | 1625 establishments | 1804 disestablishments | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since October 2007 | History of Haiti | Abolition of Slavery | 1697 establishments
Saint-Domingue was a French colony from 1659 to 1804, when it became the independent nation of Haiti. Saint-Domingue is the French version of the Spanish name Santo Domingo. Spain controlled the entire island of Hispaniola (also called Santo Domingo or San Domingo) from the 1490s until the 17th century, when French pirates began to establish bases on the western portions of the island. In the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain formally recognized French control of the western third of the island. This island of the Greater Antilles was discovered by Christopher Columbus on December 5, 1492. He named it Hispaniola. The people of culture Arawak, the Caribbean and Tainos occupied the island before the arrival of the Spaniards. Spain called the island Santo Domingo. The western part of Hispaniola being neglected by the Spanish colonists, French buccaneers settled there, first on the Ile de la Tortue, also Island of Torguga or Island of the Tortoise, then on Grande Terre (mainland West Hispaniola). French called the western part Saint Domingue. In the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain formally recognized French control of the western third of the island. In 1804, Saint Domingue became the independent nation of Haïti.
EstablishmentFrench buccaneers established a settlement on the island of Tortuga in 1625, before going to Grande Terre (mainland). They survived by pirating Spanish ships, eating wild cattle and hogs, and selling hides to traders of all nations. Although the Spanish destroyed the buccaneers' settlements several times, on each occasion they returned due to abundance of natural resources viz. hardwood trees, wild hogs and cattle, and fresh water. The settlement on Tortuga was officially established in 1659 under the commission of King Louis XIV. Among buccaneers was Bertrand d'Ogeron. He played a big part in the settlement of Saint Domingue. He could support the plantation of tobacco, thus allowing to turn into a sedentary population number of buccaneers and freebooters who didn’t gently accept the royal authority until the years 1660. Bertrand d' Orgeron attracted also many colonists of Martinique and Guadeloupe, like Roy (Jean Roy, buccaneer, 1625-1707), Hebert (Jean Hebert, 1624, and his family) and the Barre (Guillaume Barre, 1642, and his family) driven out by the land pressure which was generated by the extension of the sugar dwellings. But in 1670, short after Cap François (later Cap Français, now Cap-Haïtien) has been established and until 1690 the crisis of the tobacco intervened and a great number of places was abandoned. The rows of the freebooting grew bigger, plundering, like those of Vera Cruz in 1683 or of Campêche in 1686, became increasingly numerous and Jean-Baptist Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay, elder son of Jean Baptist Colbert and at the time Minister of the Navy, brought back some order by taking a great number of measures. Among those appeared the creation of plantations of the indigo and of the cane sugar. The first sugar windmill was created in 1685. Under the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, Spain officially ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France. Thriving colonyPrior 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 disrupted maritime commerce, the colony underwent rapid expansion. In 1767, it exported 72 million pounds of raw sugar and 51 million pounds of refined sugar, one million pounds of indigo, and two million pounds of cotton.[1] Saint-Domingue became known as the "Pearl of the Antilles" — one of the richest colonies in the 18th century French empire. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, roughly the size of Maryland or Belgium, produced more sugar and coffee than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined. The labor for these plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves (accounting in 1783-1791 for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade). Between 1764 and 1771, the average importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000, by 1786 about 28,000 and, from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year. However, the inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from Africa meant the slave population, by 1789, totaled 500,000, ruled over by a white population that, by 1789, numbered only 32,000.[2] At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from experiencing growth through natural increase [1]. African culture thus remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion of Vodou, which commingled Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of Guinea, Congo and Dahomey.[3] Slave traders scoured the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of different tribes, their languages often incommensurable. The majority came from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, followed by Bantus from Congo and Angola[citation needed]. To regularise slavery, in 1685 Louis XVI had enacted the code noir, which accorded certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to the master, who was obliged to feed, clothe and provide for the general well-being of their slaves. The code noir also sanctioned corporal punishment, allowing masters to employ brutal methods to instill in their slaves the necessary docilitiy, while ignoring provisions intended to regulate the administration of punishments. A passage from Henri Christophe's personal secretary, who lived more than half his life as a slave, describes the crimes perpetrated against the slaves of Saint-Domingue by their French masters:
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