Contact Admin. It occupies the western three-eighths of the island which it shares with the Dominican Republic. The first Europeans arrived on 5 December during the first voyage of Christopher Columbus , who initially believed he had found India or China.
Competing claims and settlements by the French led to the western portion of the island being ceded to France , which named it Saint-Domingue. French colonists established lucrative sugarcane plantations , worked by slaves brought from Africa, which made the colony one of the richest in the world.
In the midst of the French Revolution β99 , slaves and free people of color launched the Haitian Revolution β , led by a former slave and the first black general of the French Army , Toussaint Louverture , whose military genius and political acumen turned a society of slaves into an independent country. After twelve years, Napoleon Bonaparte 's army was defeated and Haiti was established as a sovereign state on 1 January βthe first independent nation of Latin America and the Caribbean , the second republic in the Americas, the first country to abolish slavery, and the only state in history established by a successful slave revolt.
It has the lowest Human Development Index in the Americas. The name was restored by Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines as the official name of independent Saint-Domingue, as a tribute to the Amerindian predecessors. In French, Haiti's nickname is the "Pearl of the Antilles" La Perle des Antilles because of both its natural beauty, [38] and the amount of wealth it accumulated for the Kingdom of France ; during the 18th century the colony was the world's leading producer of sugar and coffee.
The people had migrated over centuries into the Caribbean islands from South America. Genetic studies show they were related to the Yanomami of the Amazon Basin.
