Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [207]
Unfortunately for the Tainos, they had gold, which the Spanish coveted but didn’t want to go to the work of mining themselves. Hence the conquerors divided up the island and its Indian population among individual Spaniards, who put the Indians to work as virtual slaves, accidentally infected them with Eurasian diseases, and murdered them. By the year 1519, 27 years after Columbus’s arrival, that original population of half a million had been reduced to about 11,000, most of whom died that year of smallpox to bring the population down to 3,000, and those survivors gradually died out or became assimilated within the next few decades. That forced the Spaniards to look elsewhere for slave laborers.
Around 1520 the Spaniards discovered that Hispaniola was suitable for growing sugar, and so they began importing slaves from Africa. The island’s sugar plantations made it a rich colony for much of the 16th century. However, the Spaniards’ interest became diverted from Hispaniola for multiple reasons, including their discovery of far more populous and richer Indian societies on the American mainland, particularly in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, offering much larger Indian populations to exploit, politically more advanced societies to take over, and rich silver mines in Bolivia. Hence Spain turned its attention elsewhere and devoted little resources to Hispaniola, especially as buying and transporting slaves from Africa were expensive and as Native Americans could be obtained just for the cost of conquering them. In addition, English, French, and Dutch pirates overran the Caribbean and attacked Spanish settlements on Hispaniola and elsewhere. Spain itself gradually went into political and economic decline, to the benefit of the English, French, and Dutch.
Along with those French pirates, French traders and adventurers built up a settlement at the western end of Hispaniola, far from the eastern part where the Spanish were concentrated. France, now much richer and politically stronger than Spain, invested heavily in importing slaves and developing plantations in its western part of the island, to a degree that the Spanish could not afford, and the histories of the two parts of the island began to diverge. During the 1700s the Spanish colony had a low population, few slaves, and a small economy based on raising cattle and selling their hides, while the French colony had a much larger population, more slaves (700,000 in 1785, compared to only 30,000 in the Spanish part), a proportionately much lower non-slave population (only 10% compared to 85%), and an economy based on sugar plantations. French Saint-Domingue, as it was called, became the richest European colony in the New World and contributed one-quarter of France’s wealth.
In 1795, Spain finally ceded its no-longer-valuable eastern part of the island to France, so that Hispaniola became briefly unified under France. After a slave rebellion broke out in French Saint-Domingue in 1791 and 1801, the French sent an army that was defeated by the slave army plus the effects of heavy losses to diseases. In 1804, having sold its North American holdings to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase, France gave up and abandoned Hispaniola. Not surprisingly, French Hispaniola’s former slaves, who renamed their country Haiti (the original Taino Indian name for the island), killed many of Haiti’s whites, destroyed the plantations and their infrastructure in order to make it impossible to rebuild the plantation slave system, and divided the plantations into small family farms. While that was what the former slaves wanted for themselves