Haiti

The island of Hispaniola, on which Haiti occupies the western third, was inhabited for several thousand years before European contact by successive waves of Arawakan-speaking peoples. By the late fifteenth century the dominant population was the Taino, organised into five chiefdoms or cacicazgos, with smaller numbers of Ciguayo and Macorix in the northeast. Christopher Columbus made landfall in December 1492 and established the short-lived settlement of La Navidad on the northern coast, beginning Spanish colonisation of the island, which the Spanish called La Española. Within a few decades the Taino population collapsed under forced labour, epidemic disease, and warfare.

Spanish attention drifted toward the mainland in the sixteenth century, and the western portion of Hispaniola became a haven for French and English buccaneers operating from the offshore island of Tortuga. France formalised its presence and, by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain ceded the western third of the island, which became the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Sustained by African slave labour on sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton plantations, Saint-Domingue grew into the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean by the late eighteenth century. In 1791 a massive uprising of enslaved people, later associated with the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, ignited the Haitian Revolution. After more than a decade of war involving French, Spanish, and British forces, the army commanded by Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated the French expedition sent by Napoleon and proclaimed independence on 1 January 1804, making Haiti the second independent state in the Americas and the first to emerge from a successful slave revolution.

The nineteenth century was politically turbulent. Dessalines was assassinated in 1806, and the country split between Henri Christophe's northern kingdom and Alexandre Petion's southern republic before reunification under Jean-Pierre Boyer in 1820. Boyer also occupied the formerly Spanish eastern part of the island from 1822 until 1844, when the Dominican Republic seceded. France recognised Haitian independence in 1825 only in exchange for a heavy indemnity that burdened public finances for over a century. A long sequence of presidencies, coups, and brief constitutional experiments culminated in the United States military occupation of 1915 to 1934, undertaken on grounds of debt and regional security and accompanied by significant infrastructural and constitutional changes.

After the occupation ended, civilian governments alternated with military intervention until Francois Duvalier was elected in 1957 and consolidated an authoritarian regime backed by the Tonton Macoute militia. He was succeeded on his death in 1971 by his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, whose rule ended with his exile in 1986. A new constitution adopted in 1987 established a semi-presidential republic, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the country's first broadly free election in 1990. He was overthrown the following year, restored under a multinational intervention in 1994, and removed again amid unrest in 2004, after which a United Nations stabilisation mission operated until 2017.

The early twenty-first century has been marked by the catastrophic earthquake of January 2010, the cholera epidemic that followed, Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July 2021. Subsequent gang violence and institutional vacancy led to the formation of a transitional presidential council in 2024 supported by a multinational security mission. Haiti remains a unitary semi-presidential republic under the 1987 constitution, governed in the present period through this transitional arrangement pending the restoration of regular elections.