The history of Haiti

Haiti occupies the western third of Hispaniola, the island the Taíno called Ayiti. Spanish conquest after 1492 destroyed the Taíno chiefdoms, and in the eighteenth century the French colony of Saint-Domingue became the most profitable colony in the world, producing sugar and coffee with the forced labour of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. In 1791 those enslaved people rose in revolt, and in 1804, after defeating the armies of Napoleon, they founded Haiti, the first state created by a successful slave revolution and the first independent nation of Latin America and the Caribbean. Independence was followed by isolation, a crushing indemnity to France, a United States occupation from 1915 to 1934 and the Duvalier dictatorship. Since 1986 Haiti has struggled to build lasting democratic institutions through coups, foreign interventions, the earthquake of 2010 and, in the 2020s, a crisis of armed gangs.

Hispaniola was first settled several thousand years ago by peoples who came by canoe from Central or South America. Around the middle of the first millennium CE, new waves of Arawak-speaking migrants, whose ancestors had moved up the chain of islands from the Orinoco region of South America, developed the culture known as Taíno. They farmed cassava, maize and sweet potatoes in mounded fields called conucos, fished, and lived in villages of round houses under hereditary chiefs, the caciques, among them women such as Anacaona. They played a ceremonial ball game in stone-lined plazas and honoured spirits and ancestors through carved figures called zemis. By 1492 the island was divided into several large chiefdoms; the west, today's Haiti, lay largely within Xaragua and Marién. Estimates of the island's population at contact are disputed, ranging from tens of thousands to well over half a million.

Taíno society was ranked, with a noble class, the nitaíno, above the commoners, the naboría, and chiefs who held power through kinship and alliances that often passed through the female line. Communities preserved their histories and myths in areítos, ceremonial songs and dances, and their behique priests used the hallucinogen cohoba to speak with the spirits. Taíno words such as hammock, hurricane, canoe and barbecue passed into European languages, and the name Ayiti, often translated as land of mountains, survives as the name of the country.

Christopher Columbus reached the north coast in December 1492, sailing for Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. When his flagship, the Santa María, ran aground near today's Cap-Haïtien, the crew built a fort, La Navidad, from its timbers; returning in 1493, Columbus found it destroyed and its men dead. The Spanish colony that followed, governed from Santo Domingo on the south coast, forced the Taíno to pan for gold and work for settlers under the encomienda system. In 1503 the governor, Nicolás de Ovando, invited the chiefs of Xaragua to a meeting, burned many of them alive and later hanged Anacaona. Violence, overwork, famine and epidemics brought by Europeans, part of the wider Columbian exchange, destroyed Taíno society within a few decades, and many historians describe what happened as genocide. Some Taíno survived in the mountains and among the population of mixed descent, and the cacique Enriquillo led a rebellion from the Bahoruco mountains in the 1520s and 1530s that won a negotiated peace.

As Indigenous labour vanished, the Spanish began importing enslaved Africans, making Hispaniola one of the starting points of the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas. Once the gold ran out and the riches of Mexico and Peru drew settlers away, the colony declined. In 1605 the Spanish Crown forcibly evacuated the north and west coasts to stop smuggling with Dutch, English and French traders, leaving the west almost empty but for wild cattle.

French buccaneers who hunted those cattle and raided Spanish shipping made Tortuga, off the north coast, their base in the seventeenth century. French settlement spread onto the mainland, and in the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697 Spain accepted French control of the western part of the island, which became Saint-Domingue. Over the next century it grew into the richest colony of the Kingdom of France. By the 1780s it produced about two-fifths of the sugar and well over half of the coffee consumed in Europe, as well as indigo and cotton.

This wealth rested on one of the harshest slave systems in the Americas. Planters imported close to 800,000 Africans, many from West Central Africa, including the Kingdom of Kongo and its neighbours, and from the Bight of Benin; so many died from overwork, disease and punishment that the population could only be maintained by constant new arrivals, and most of the enslaved in 1789 had been born in Africa. The Code Noir issued under Louis XIV in 1685 regulated slavery in theory but did little to restrain masters. On the eve of the revolution about 500,000 enslaved people were ruled by some 30,000 whites, alongside a similar number of free people of colour, many of them landowners and some slaveholders themselves, who were denied equal rights. Enslaved people resisted by running away to form maroon bands, by poisoning and sabotage, and through Vodou, a religion that combined West and Central African traditions with Catholic elements. The maroon leader François Makandal, burned at the stake in 1758, became a legendary figure of resistance.

The French Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man set off a struggle in the colony. Free men of colour demanded equal rights, and when Vincent Ogé led a small revolt in 1790 he was captured and broken on the wheel. In August 1791, after a gathering at Bois Caïman associated with the Vodou priest Dutty Boukman, enslaved people in the Northern Plain rose in a coordinated revolt, burning plantations and killing planters. Within weeks tens of thousands had joined.

The Haitian Revolution became a war involving France, Spain and Britain. To win support against Spanish and British invaders, the French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax declared emancipation in the north in August 1793, and on 4 February 1794 the National Convention of the French First Republic abolished slavery in all French colonies. Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved coachman who had become the most able rebel commander, then left the Spanish service and fought for France. By 1798 he had forced the British to withdraw, in 1800 he defeated his rival André Rigaud in the south, and in 1801 he occupied the Spanish side of the island and issued a constitution that made him governor for life, while still acknowledging French sovereignty.

Napoleon, seeking to restore planter rule and, as later became clear, slavery, sent a large army under his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, which landed in early 1802. Toussaint was tricked into a meeting, arrested and deported to France, where he died in the prison of Fort de Joux in April 1803. When news came that Napoleon had restored slavery in Guadeloupe, the Black and mixed-race generals who had submitted to Leclerc, among them Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe and Alexandre Pétion, rejoined the war. Yellow fever killed Leclerc and much of his army, and on 18 November 1803 Dessalines defeated his successor, Rochambeau, at Vertières. On 1 January 1804, at Gonaïves, Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, restoring the Taíno name. In the following months he ordered the killing of most of the remaining French whites, several thousand people. The loss of Saint-Domingue helped persuade Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States in 1803.

Dessalines crowned himself Emperor Jacques I in 1804 and tried to keep the plantations running under military discipline; he was assassinated in 1806. The country then split. Christophe ruled the north as a state and, from 1811, a kingdom, building the vast mountain fortress of the Citadelle Laferrière and the palace of Sans-Souci. Pétion governed a republic in the south, where he distributed land to soldiers and smallholders and sheltered and armed Simón Bolívar in 1815 and 1816 in return for a promise to free the enslaved in South America. Jean-Pierre Boyer, Pétion's successor, reunited Haiti after Christophe's suicide in 1820 and in 1822 occupied the eastern, formerly Spanish part of the island, which he held until the Dominican Republic won its independence in 1844.

Haiti was shunned by the slaveholding powers. In 1825 a French squadron arrived at Port-au-Prince with an ordinance from Charles X demanding 150 million francs to compensate former colonists for their lost property, including the people they had enslaved, in return for recognition. Boyer accepted under threat of war. The sum was reduced to 90 million in 1838, but Haiti had to borrow from French banks to pay it, and the combined debt and interest took until 1947 to clear. A 2022 investigation by The New York Times estimated that the payments cost Haiti between 21 and 115 billion dollars in lost economic growth. Britain recognised Haiti in 1833, but the United States, under pressure from Southern slaveholders, refused until 1862, during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

The rural majority built a society of small peasant farms producing coffee and food crops, resisting attempts such as Boyer's Rural Code of 1826 to bind them to plantations, while a largely mixed-race urban elite and a Black military class competed for control of the state. Faustin Soulouque ruled as Emperor Faustin I from 1849 to 1859 and repeatedly invaded the Dominican Republic. Presidents rose and fell through revolts by regional armies and peasant fighters known as cacos, and foreign warships repeatedly appeared in Haitian ports to enforce merchants' claims. Haitian writers such as Anténor Firmin, whose 1885 book On the Equality of Human Races answered European racial theory, made the country an intellectual centre of the African diaspora.

Between 1911 and 1915 seven Haitian presidents were overthrown or killed. In July 1915 President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam ordered the execution of 167 political prisoners and was then dragged from the French legation and killed by a crowd. Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines the same day, citing disorder and fear of German influence. The United States took control of Haiti's customs and finances, installed a compliant president, and in 1918 imposed a constitution allowing foreigners to own land, which had been banned since independence. A forced labour system for road building, the corvée, provoked a peasant uprising led by Charlemagne Péralte; the Marines killed him in 1919 and crushed the revolt, at a cost of thousands of Haitian lives. Under the Good Neighbor Policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt the troops left in 1934, though American control of Haitian finances lasted until 1947. In 1937 the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican borderlands.

François Duvalier, a country doctor and ideologue of Black nationalism, was elected president in 1957. "Papa Doc" quickly built a dictatorship enforced by his militia, the Tontons Macoutes, which killed, tortured and exiled opponents and drove much of the educated class abroad. He declared himself president for life in 1964, the year his forces massacred members of mixed-race families in Jérémie, and kept American support during the Cold War by presenting himself as a barrier to communism after the Cuban revolution. When he died in 1971 his nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude, "Baby Doc", succeeded him. Corruption, poverty and the flight of tens of thousands of "boat people" marked his rule, and in February 1986, after months of protests, he fled to France. Tens of thousands of Haitians are estimated to have been killed under the two Duvaliers.

A constitution approved in 1987 promised democracy, but elections that year were aborted by a massacre of voters. In December 1990 Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a priest of liberation theology from the slums of Port-au-Prince, won Haiti's first free presidential election by a landslide. He was overthrown by the army in September 1991, and a military regime killed thousands of his supporters. In 1994 a US-led multinational force restored him to power, and in 1995 the army was disbanded. Aristide's protégé René Préval succeeded him in 1996, and Aristide returned to office in 2001 after disputed elections. In February 2004, facing an armed rebellion and pressure from the United States and France, he left the country on an American plane, saying he had been forced out. A United Nations stabilisation mission was deployed that year and stayed until 2017.

On 12 January 2010 an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 destroyed much of Port-au-Prince and nearby towns, killing more than 200,000 people, with the government estimate exceeding 300,000. Months later cholera, introduced by UN peacekeepers, began an epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 people; the UN apologised for its role in 2016.

Michel Martelly and then Jovenel Moïse governed amid large protests over corruption and fuel prices. Moïse ruled by decree after parliamentary elections were not held, and on 7 July 2021 he was assassinated at his home by a squad of armed men. Weeks later an earthquake killed more than 2,000 people in the southwest. With no elected officials left at national level, armed gangs expanded across Port-au-Prince. In early 2024 rival coalitions united as Viv Ansanm, stormed the capital's main prisons and freed thousands of inmates, and acting prime minister Ariel Henry, unable to return from abroad, agreed to step down. A Transitional Presidential Council took office in April 2024 with a mandate to hold elections, and from June 2024 a Kenyan-led multinational police mission arrived to support the police; in October 2025 it was succeeded by a UN-authorised Gang Suppression Force. Gang violence killed thousands of people a year and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes. The council's mandate expired on 7 February 2026 without an election, leaving Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé as the sole head of the executive, and elections have been repeatedly postponed.