For nearly a decade in the late 18th century, Haiti accounted for more than one-third of the entire Atlantic slave trade. But Haiti's riches could only be exploited by importing up to 40,000 slaves a year. A treaty with Spain 30 years later saw Madrid cede the western third of the island to Paris.Įconomically, French occupation was a runaway success. The French West India Company gradually assumed control of the colony, and by 1665 France had formally claimed it as Saint-Domingue.
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As Spanish interest in the island faltered with the discovery of gold and silver elsewhere in Latin America, the early occupiers moved east, leaving the western part of Hispaniola free for English, Dutch and particularly French buccaneers. The native Taino people knew it as Ayiti, but Columbus claimed it for the Spanish crown and named it La Isla Española. Haiti, or rather the large island in the western Atlantic of which the present-day Republic of Haiti occupies the western part, was discovered by Christopher Columbus in December 1492. It subsequently became the first independent nation in Latin America, and remains the world's oldest black republic and the second-oldest republic in the western hemisphere after the United States. In the 1780s, Haiti exported 60% of all the coffee and 40% of all the sugar consumed in Europe: more than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined. In the 18th century, under French rule, Haiti – then called Saint-Domingue – was the Pearl of the Antilles, one of the richest islands in France's empire (though 800,000-odd African slaves who produced that wealth saw precious little of it).
This is a catastrophe beyond our worst imagination." It sounds a terrible cliche, but it really is a perfect storm.
"Now it has poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, no infrastructure, environmental disaster and large areas without the rule of law. "Haiti has had slavery, revolution, debt, deforestation, corruption, exploitation and violence," says Alex von Tunzelmann, a historian and writer currently working on a book about the country and its near neighbours, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. Countries, when it comes to dealing with disaster, do not get worse. Every single factor that international experts look for when trying to measure a nation's vulnerability to natural disasters is, in Haiti, at the very top of the scale. In Haiti, the last five centuries have combined to produce a people so poor, an infrastructure so nonexistent and a state so hopelessly ineffectual that whatever natural disaster chooses to strike next, its impact on the population will be magnified many, many times over. Wretched, also, to have fallen victim to calamitous flooding in 2002, 2003 (twice), 20.īut what has really left Haiti in such a state today, what makes the country a constant and heart-rending site of recurring catastrophe, is its history. It's more than unfortunate to be positioned plumb on the region's principal hurricane track, meaning you would be hit, in the 2008 season alone, by a quartet of storms as deadly and destructive as Fay, Gustav, Hannah and Ike (between them, they killed 800 people, and devastated more than 70% of Haiti's agricultural land). There are, plainly, more propitious places for a country and its capital city to find themselves than straddling the major fault line between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. G eography and bad luck are only partly to blame for Haiti's tragedy.
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