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.
