Istwa Nou

On 18 August 1517 the Spanish government licensed the import of enslaved Africans into Hispaniola in large numbers. Bartolome de las Casas had pressed for it. He had spent years fighting the encomienda system and the destruction of the Taino, and what he put to the court was a substitution: bring labour from Africa and the surviving indigenous people would be left alone. He came to regret it and wrote so, once he understood that he had helped fasten one people into slavery while trying to release another. Rayford Logan, writing in 1941, treats the licence as the point at which the history of this island parted from every other European holding in the region. The traffic it opened ran three hundred years and carried hundreds of thousands of people into the western third of Hispaniola, under conditions at sea that killed a large share of them. Men and women who rose in 1791 had made that crossing and remembered it.

On 20 September 1697, in the treaty signed at Ryswick, Spain recognised French sovereignty over the western third of Hispaniola. Spain had claimed the whole island since 1492 and had lost working control of its western end decades before, as French buccaneers occupied the coast and the offshore island of Tortuga and proved impossible to dislodge. The treaty confirmed the fact on the ground and drew no precise line, leaving a question open for two hundred years. From this point the two halves carry separate names in the record. The French portion is Saint-Domingue and the Spanish portion is Santo Domingo, and Rayford Logan is careful with the distinction because his sources often are not. The frontier between them was disputed, redrawn, invaded across, and fixed by treaty only in 1929. France meanwhile developed its share into the most profitable overseas territory any European state possessed. Two countries share the island today, and the line between them was first sketched by diplomats settling a European war.