Haiti, officially the Republic of Haiti and previously called Hayti, is a nation located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles island chain of the Caribbean Sea, to the eastern of Cuba as well as Jamaica and also south of The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. It occupies the western three-eighths of the island which it shows the Dominican Republic.

To its south-west exists the tiny Navassa Island, which is asserted by Haiti yet is contested as an USA area under federal management. Haiti is 27,750 km2 (10,714 sq mi) in dimension, the 3rd largest nation in the Caribbean by location, and has actually an approximated population of 11.4 million, making it the most populated country in the Caribbean. The capital is Port-au-Prince.

The island was originally occupied by the aboriginal Taíno people, that originated in South America. The very first Europeans arrived on 5 December 1492 throughout the very first voyage of Christopher Columbus, who originally believed he had found India or China. Columbus subsequently started the initial European settlement in the Americas, La Navidad, on what is currently the northeastern coast of Haiti.

The island was declared by Spain and also called La Española, developing part of the Spanish Empire until the early 17th century. Nevertheless, competing insurance claims as well as settlements by the French caused the western part of the island being delivered to France in 1697, which was ultimately named Saint-Domingue. French colonists developed rewarding sugarcane haciendas, functioned by large numbers of slaves brought from Africa, which made the nest among the wealthiest in the world.

In the midst of the Reign of terror (1789– 99), servants as well as complimentary individuals of shade launched the Haitian Change (1791– 1804), led by a previous slave and the initial black general of the French Army, Toussaint Louverture.

After 12 years of dispute, Napoleon Bonaparte’s pressures were beat by Louverture’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines (later Emperor Jacques I), that proclaimed Haiti’s sovereignty on 1 January 1804– the first independent country of Latin America and also the Caribbean, the second republic in the Americas, the very first nation in the Americas to eliminate enslavement, as well as the only state in history developed by a successful slave rebellion.

Besides Alexandre Pétion, the initial Head of state of the Republic, all of Haiti’s initial leaders were previous slaves. After a brief period in which the nation was split in two, President Jean-Pierre Boyer united the nation and afterwards tried to bring the entire of Hispaniola under Haitian control, speeding up a long series of wars that ended in the 1870s when Haiti officially recognized the self-reliance of the Dominican Republic.