The Haitian Revolution, also known as the Haitian War of Independence, was a successful insurrection by enslaved Africans against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti. The revolution was one of the only known slave rebellions in human history that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery (though not from forced labour) and ruled by former captives. Vincent Ogé's 1790 revolt by free Mulattoes (of mixed French and African ancestry) pressured the French Revolutionary government to grant them citizenship in May 1791, leading to further clashes with slave owners that destabilized Saint-Domingue and led to the slave revolt on 21 August 1791, which ended with the former colony's independence on 1 January 1804, with the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerging as its most prominent general. The successful revolution was a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World and the revolution's effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms the former slaves had won, and with the collaboration of already free people of color, of their independence from white Europeans. The revolution was the largest slave uprising since Spartacus's unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier, and challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged African inferiority and about slaves' ability to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels' organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners in the hemisphere. Compared to other Atlantic revolutions, the events in Haiti have received relatively little public attention in retrospect: historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot characterizes the historiography of the Haitian Revolution as being "silenced" by that of the French Revolution.
Background
Slave economy in Saint-Domingue Much of Caribbean economic development in the 18th century was contingent on Europeans' demand for sugar. Plantation owners produced sugar as a commodity crop from cultivation of sugarcane, which required extensive labor. The colony of Saint-Domingue also had extensive coffee, cocoa and indigo plantations, but these were smaller and less profitable than the sugar plantations. The commodity crops were traded for European goods. Starting in the 1730s, French engineers constructed complex irrigation systems to increase sugarcane production. By the following decade, Saint-Domingue, together with the British colony of Jamaica, had become the main suppliers of the world's sugar. Production of sugar depended on extensive manual labor provided by enslaved Africans. An average of 600 ships engaged every year in shipping products from Saint-Domingue to Bordeaux, and the value of the colony's crops and goods was almost equal in value to all of the products shipped from the Thirteen Colonies to Great Britain. The livelihood of 1 million of the approximately 25 million people who lived in France in 1789 depended directly upon the agricultural imports from Saint-Domingue, and several million indirectly depended upon trade from the colony to maintain their standard of living. Saint-Domingue was the most profitable French colony in the world, indeed one of the most profitable of all the European colonies in the 18th century. Slavery sustained sugar production under harsh conditions; diseases such as malaria (brought from Africa) and yellow fever caused high mortality, thriving in the tropical Caribbean climate. In 1787 alone, approximately 20,000 slaves were transported from Africa to Saint-Domingue, in comparison to the roughly 38,000 slaves that were imported to the British West Indies. The death rate from yellow fever was such that at least 50% of the slaves from Africa died within a year of arriving, so the white planters preferred to work their slaves as hard as possible, providing them only the bare minimum of food and shelter; they calculated that it was better to get the most work out of their slaves with the lowest expense possible, since they were probably going to die of yellow fever anyway. The death rate was so high that polyandry—one woman being married to several men at the same time—developed as a common form of marriage among the slaves. As slaves had no legal rights, rape by planters, their unmarried sons or overseers was a common occurrence on the plantations.
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