What Was The Economy Of Saint Domingue Dependent Upon? Select Four Options?

The economy of the Saint-Domingue colony was almost exclusively based on the export of plantation crops. The correct answer is mentioned below: A) Out of sugar plantations.

As a result, Option A is correct because the economy of the Saint-Domingue colony was almost exclusively based on the export of plantation crops.

Shortly before the Haitian Revolution, Saint-Domingue produced roughly 40% of the sugar and 60% of the coffee supplied to Europe. The economy of Saint-colonial Domingue was almost entirely based on the sugar business.

During the French empire, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the world’s wealthiest and richest colony.

Prior to the Haitian Revolution, Saint-Domingue provided Europe with around 40% of sugar and 60% of coffee.

The economy of the Saint-Domingue colony was almost exclusively based on the export of plantation crops.

What was the economy of Saint-Domingue dependent upon select 4?

The colonial economy of Saint-Domingue was based almost entirely on the production of plantation crops for export. Enslaved African workers grew sugar in the northern plains around Cap Français, for example, and coffee in the mountainous interior.

Which led African enslaved persons outnumbered free people 10 to 1 in St Domingue?

African enslaved persons outnumbered free people 10 to 1 in Saint Dominique, which led to a massive and successful uprising.

Why did plantation owners of Saint-Domingue use cruel and ruthless?

Why did plantation owners of Saint Dominigue use cruel and ruthless methods of treatment toward enslaved persons? to render the enslaved powerless as to not revolt.

What was a French colony in the Caribbean sea where 100000 slaves rebelled became a country called?

While the French Revolution was taking place, oppressed 2 people in the French colony of Haiti rose up against their French masters. In August 1791, 100,000 enslaved Africans rose in revolt.

What were the four main social groups in Saint-Domingue?

Code Noir (1685) This piece of legislation was passed by Louis XIV in 1685. It established the religious expectations of French colonies but was largely concerned with defining the conditions of slavery. This included but was not limited to the status of children born to enslaved women, marriages, and punishable offenses. “Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie francaise de lisle Saint-Domingue” excerpt (1797) In this excerpt, the author provides an overview of the different social classes in Saint-Domingue: slaves, the black and mixed freedmen, and the white colonists. He also provides some information concerning how these classes interact with each other and how they fit into the social hierarchy. more. “Memoir in Favor of the People of Color or Mixed–Race of Saint Domingue” (1789) This source establishes one of the ways in which social distinctions were made in Saint-Domingue, namely on the basis of color. In it, the Abbé Grégoire also expresses a desire for unity between white and mixed race people to better control the colony’s slaves. Motion Made by Vincent Ogé the Younger to the Assembly of Colonists (1789) In this speech, Ogé argues for the rights of free people of color in Saint-Domingue. At the same time, he encourages an alliance between the free people of color and the white colonists for the purpose of maintaining control over the colony’s slaves. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents / Edition 1 The first section of this book offers an overview of the Haitian Revolution spanning a few years prior to the creation of independent Haiti in 1804. The second section allows one to view the revolution’s progression through contemporary documents.

How did St Domingue make money?

Once the richest colony in the world, Saint Domingue was a leader in the production of sugar, coffee, indigo, cacao, and cotton. – Haiti’s early history is characterized by remarkable economic output. On the eve of the Haitian Revolution, Saint Domingue had become the most lucrative colony on earth.

It was the world’s top producer of sugar and coffee and among the global leaders in indigo, cacao and cotton (which was rising rapidly in importance). Indeed, Saint Domingue, occupying only a small territory, outproduced the entire Spanish empire in the Americas. One in eight people in France derived their living from the enormous trade joining France with this small and distant place, 4800 nautical miles away.

The reasons for this extraordinary performance can be explained from a number of factors – qualities of land and climate, government support, and more than anything, the presence of a huge number of enslaved Africans who propelled this extensive economic system with their labor.

Roughly 8000 plantations (” habitations “) prospered during the eighteenth century, entirely dependent on slavery. To be “as rich as a creole” was a famous boast of the time, and Saint Domingue was lionized as “the pearl of the Antilles.” At its peak, the economy of Saint Domingue created a tax base of one billion livres, and annually sent goods worth 150-170 million livres into France.

The books included here offer insight into how this elaborate economy functioned.

What percent (%) of the population of Saint Domingue did slaves make up by the 19th century?

In fact, by the late 18th century, more slaves were imported to Saint- Domingue every year—more than 40,000—than the entire white population of the island. Drawings of the wealthy white plantation owners; painting of the wealthy, free people of color By the 19th century, slaves made up about 90% of the population.

Who was the first enslaved African?

First enslaved Africans arrive in Jamestown, setting the stage for slavery in North America. On August 20, 1619, ’20 and odd’ Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are then bought by English colonists.

What did the population of St Domingue have mostly in 1789?

Colonial rule and slavery – The Spanish began to enslave the native Taino and Ciboney people soon after December 1492, when Italian navigator Christopher Columbus sighted the island that he called La Isla Española (“The Spanish Island”; later Anglicized as Hispaniola,) The island’s indigenous population, forced to mine for gold, was devastated by European diseases and brutal working conditions, and by the end of the 16th century the people had virtually vanished. Britannica Quiz Slavery and Resistance Through History Quiz After the main gold mines were exhausted, the Spanish were succeeded by the French, who established their own permanent settlements, including Port-de-Paix (1665) in the northwest, and the French West Indies Corporation took control of the area.

• Landowners in western Hispaniola imported increasing numbers of African slaves, who totaled about 5,000 in the late 17th century.
• By 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the estimated population of Saint-Domingue, as the French called their colony, was 556,000 and included roughly 500,000 African slaves, 32,000 European colonists, and 24,000 affranchis (free mulattoes or blacks).

Haitian society was deeply fragmented by skin colour, class, and gender. The affranchis, most of them mulattoes, were sometimes slave owners themselves and aspired to the economic and social levels of the Europeans. They feared and spurned the slave majority but were generally discriminated against by the white European colonists, who were merchants, landowners, overseers, craftsmen, and the like.

• The aspirations of the affranchis became a major factor in the colony’s struggle for independence.
• A large part of the slave population was African-born, from a number of West African peoples.
• The vast majority worked in the fields; others were household servants, boilermen (at the sugar mills), and even slave drivers.

Slaves endured long, backbreaking workdays and often died from injuries, infections, and tropical diseases. Malnutrition and starvation also were common. Some slaves managed to escape into the mountainous interior, where they became known as Maroons and fought guerrilla battles against colonial militia.

How bad was slavery in Saint Domingue?

The Slaves – The slave trade as ruthless as it was inhumane—and nowhere was it worse than on the colony of Saint Domingue. Slaves were worked “16 or 18 hours a day, for seven or eight months in the year.” Colonists treated their slaves however they wished.

Mutilations were common, as was pouring burning wax on the slave, emptying boiling sugar cane over their heads, burning them alive, burying them up to the neck and smearing their heads with sugar to be devoured by flies, fastening them near nests of ants and wasps, making them eat their excrement, and the most common—whipping.

The conditions on Saint Domingue were so horrific, and the need for labor so strong, that it became impossible for plantation owners to meet the growing need for labor. The slaves could not reproduce fast enough to keep pace with the demand. Men, women, and children were shipped to the colony from the African coast.

• By 1787, Saint Domingue was importing more than 40,000 slaves a year.
• With these staggering numbers, the island’s slave population numbered around 500,000 in 1791.
• In 1764, the colony was importing between 10,000 and 15,000 slaves each year.
• Blinded by their wealth, the white planters seemed to forget the human value of those that they uprooted and brought to their island.

Though the France passed laws restricting and abolishing slavery, the whites of Saint Domingue continued to pass legislation that allowed the horrors to continue. The rights of the slaves were as restrained as the slaves themselves. It was only a matter of time before something snapped.

Why did slavery end in Saint Domingue?

Slavery in Haiti began after the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the island in 1492 with the European colonists that followed from Portugal, Spain and France. The practice was devastating to the native population. Following the indigenous Tainos ‘ near decimation from forced labor, disease and war, the Spanish, under initial advisement of the Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas and with the blessing of the Catholic church, began engaging in earnest during the 17th century in the forced labor of enslaved Africans,

During the French colonial period, beginning in 1625, the economy of Saint-Domingue (today Haiti ), was based on slavery ; conditions on Saint-Domingue became notoriously bad even compared to chattel slavery conditions elsewhere. The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803, became the only successful slave revolt in human history, and precipitated the end of slavery not only in Saint-Domingue, but in all French colonies.

However, this revolt has only merited a marginal role in the histories of Portuguese and Spanish America. Moreover, it is to this rebellion in Haiti that the struggle for independence in Latin American can be traced to. However, several Haitian leaders following the revolution employed forced labor, believing a plantation-style economy was the only way for Haiti to succeed, and building fortifications to safeguard against attack by the French.

1. During the U.S.
2. Occupation between 1915 and 1934, the U.S.
3. Military forced Haitians to work building roads for defense against Haitian resistance fighters.
4. Unpaid labor is still a practice in Haiti.
5. As many as half a million children are unpaid domestic servants called restavek, who routinely suffer physical and sexual abuse.

Additionally, human trafficking, including child trafficking is a significant problem in Haiti; trafficked people are brought into, out of, and through Haiti for forced labor, including sex trafficking, The groups most at risk include the poor, women, children, the homeless, and people migrating across the border with the Dominican Republic,

• The devastating earthquake in 2010 displaced many, rendering them homeless, isolated, and supremely vulnerable to exploitation by traffickers.
• The chaos following the quake also distracted authorities and hindered efforts to stop trafficking.
• The government has taken steps to prevent and stop trafficking, ratifying human rights conventions and enacting laws to protect the vulnerable, but enforcement remains difficult.

The U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons placed the country in “Tier 2 Watchlist” in 2017.

Why did France abolish slavery in St Domingue?

Background – In 1789, the abolitionist Amis des noirs society was established in France. It was more radical than similar organizations in Britain, seeking to abolish slavery rather than solely the slave trade. It ultimately proved unable to accomplish this goal and is perceived by modern historians as ineffective.

1. At the beginning of the French Revolution, a measure to abolish slavery was proposed and then dropped due to opposition from the nobility.
2. In 1790, the National Assembly affirmed its support for the institution of slavery.
3. The colony of Saint-Domingue in particular was important to the French economy,

A 1791 slave revolt took control of large parts of the colony and by 1793 Britain was threatening to invade the colony while Spain was already waging an undeclared war from Santo Domingo, These internal and external struggles led to a progressive abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue.

1. In a first time, beginning during the destruction of the Cap, in June 1793, only the slaves who would fight on the side of the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel could be freed.
2. Then, on 27 August 1793, Polverel freed also, in the West province, the slaves who worked on the plantations where there were no more masters.

On 29 August 1793, Sonthonax abolished slavery in the North province. Polverel freed progressively other slaves in the two others provinces of the West and the South, and, on 31 October 1793, he proclaimed slavery abolished in them too. This was a strategic measure to help strengthen the French Republican cause against the Spanish and British, as slavery was legal in the overseas colonies of both nations.

When did France end slavery?

In February 1794, the French republic outlawed slavery in its colonies. Revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue secured not only their own freedom, but that of their French colonial counterparts, too. After Napoleon Bonaparte wrested control of revolutionary France, he sought to reconstruct a French Empire.

Where did France take slaves from?

Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle outfitted large numbers of slave voyages that moved captives from vast regions of western Africa (from Senegambia to West-Central Africa) to the Dutch and French Guianas, Caribbean islands, and even the Spanish Caribbean mainland and Mississippi Delta, including Louisiana.

How many slaves were there in New France when it was conquered by the British?

The story of Black slavery in Canadian history | CMHR We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. Keep browsing to accept. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is located on Indigenous ancestral lands on Treaty One Territory. The Red River Valley is also the birthplace of the Métis. Source: North American Black Historical Museum, Collection of the Amherstburg Freedom Museum. Photo: CMHR, Aaron Cohen Canada takes pride in the history of the Underground Railroad. We celebrate being a destination for freedom‐seeking enslaved Americans fleeing to the north.

But Canada also has its own long history of slavery, and the legacy of slavery lives on in anti‐Black racism in Canada today. Practices of enslavement in what is now Canada predate the arrival of Europeans. Some Indigenous peoples enslaved prisoners taken in war.1 Europeans brought a different kind of slavery to North America, however.

Many Europeans saw enslaved people merely as property to be bought and sold.2 This “chattel slavery” was a dehumanizing and violent system of abuse and subjugation. Importantly, Europeans viewed slavery in racist terms. Indigenous and African peoples were seen as less than human. The deck plans of a late 18 th ‐century British ship used to transport enslaved people. It clearly shows the dehumanizing conditions they endured. Photo: Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division In the 15 th century, European colonial powers began the large‐scale practice of transporting enslaved people from Africa.

1. Slave traders shipped them under horrifying conditions across the Atlantic.
2. Colonial authorities and landowners forced them to serve as slave labour in the Caribbean and in North and South America.
3. A pattern emerged called “triangular trade.” European merchants brought trade goods from Europe to Africa.

In Africa, they exchanged their goods for enslaved people. In the Americas, the surviving enslaved people were sold, and goods produced by slave labour were carried back to Europe for sale. More than 12 million African people were taken into slavery. At least two million more died en route across the Atlantic.

The widespread violence of slave raids and kidnappings killed and displaced millions more. European colonizers held a racist double standard about slavery. Slavery had been illegal in France and England for hundreds of years. And yet both England and France freely enslaved millions of Black people in their faraway colonies.

The transatlantic slave trade was thus a distinctively colonial and white supremacist form of violence and exploitation. It was a key aspect of European imperialism and exploitation across half the world. A map of the transatlantic slave trade triangle. Millions of enslaved people were brought to the Americas through this route. Most ended up in South America, the Caribbean and the United States, and some of them were taken to Canada. Source: CMHR The colony of New France was founded in the early 1600s.

1. It was the first major European colonial settlement in what is now Canada.
2. Slavery was a common practice in the territory.
3. When New France was conquered by the British in 1758–1760, records revealed that approximately 3,600 enslaved people had lived there since its beginnings.3 The majority of them were Indigenous (often called “Panis” 4 ).

Black enslaved people were also present because of the transatlantic slave trade. King Louis XIV authorized the importing of enslaved Black people to New France in 1689, at the request of the colonial government. In 1709, New France passed laws that explicitly legalized slavery and defined slaves as property – and thus as having no rights. Cover page of a copy of the Code noir (Black Code) from 1743. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France Colonial slave laws such as the Code Noir provided a few minimal protections to enslaved people. The Code required owners to provide slaves with food, shelter, and clothing.

But it also empowered slave owners to inflict violent punishments on slaves, including branding, mutilating and even killing them. Free Black people in New France were at constant risk of being enslaved. In 1732, Governor Jonquierre enslaved a Black freedom seeker who had arrived from New England on the basis that “a black is a slave, wherever he may be found.” 6 The runaway slaveshall have his ears cut off, and shall be branded with the fleur de lis on the shoulder.

On the third offence, he shall suffer death. Article 32 of the 2nd edition of the Code Noir Slavery continued after the British formally took control of New France in 1763. The formal agreements that ended the war affirmed the continued enslavement of Black and Indigenous people.

The era of British rule saw an increase in the number of Black enslaved people in Canada. In the late 1770s and early 1780s, Loyalists fleeing from the newly independent United States brought hundreds of enslaved Black people with them. John Simcoe, the first governor of Upper Canada (now Ontario), was surprised at how many colonists owned slaves when he arrived in 1792.7 Early Canada is sometimes described as a “society with slaves” rather than a “slave society.” At the time, much of the Caribbean and the southern United States were slave societies.

There, large‐scale slave labour on plantations was a dominant force in economics, politics and culture.8 Enslaved people made up a smaller proportion of the population in early Canada than in plantation economies. This meant they toiled in relative isolation, which inhibited the creation of shared community. An announcement of the sale of enslaved people. It appeared in the Quebec Gazette in May 1785. One of the horrors of slavery was that enslaved people were treated as property rather than as human beings. Photo: Quebec Gazette White colonists of many walks of life owned slaves.

Merchants owned the largest number, but farmers, the political elite, and the Church were also slave owners. Enslaved people acted as servants, as farm labour and as skilled artisans. Their forced labour contributed to the success and prosperity of the British colonies that became modern Canada. The nature of slavery meant that its victims were stripped of their basic human rights, exploited for labour, and subjected to arbitrary violence and suffering.

Most wills from the time treated enslaved people as nothing more than property, passing on ownership of human beings exactly as they would furniture, cattle or land.10 Slave owners subjected enslaved people to terrible working and living conditions. Physical and sexual abuse was a constant threat.

Enslaved people lived tremendously difficult, very short lives. Enslaved Black people in New France, for instance, died at an average age of only 25.11 This is what needs to be acknowledged in Canada. We’re talking about, within these Canadian colonies, enslaved Africanswho had all kinds of violence committed upon their bodies.

Afua Cooper, James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies (2011-2017), Dalhousie University Enslaved people often resisted the institution of slavery. They fought back in many ways: by asserting their humanity in the face of a system that wished to deny it to them, by running away from slave holders or by assisting other freedom seekers.

• In fact, in 1777, a number of enslaved people fled from British North America into the state of Vermont, which had abolished slavery in that same year.12 Public campaigns against slavery took hold in England in the late 1700s.
• Formerly enslaved Black authors and activists, such as Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, were influential in the abolitionist fight.

From the 1770s on, popular memoirs of slavery and widely publicized court cases that freed enslaved people inspired a growing resistance to slavery in England. An advertisement offering $20 for the capture of an escaped enslaved person in Nova Scotia, dating from March of 1794. Many enslaved people made similar attempts to win freedom. Photo: Nova Scotia Archives, Weekly Chronicle 15 March 1794 p.1 Abolitionist sentiments took longer to reach Canada.

But by the turn of the 1800s, attitudes to slavery among the free population of British North America were beginning to change. Accounts of dehumanizing violence and moral arguments against slavery began appearing in newspapers. Despite the influx of enslaved people in the early 1780s, few people remained enslaved in Canada by the late 1790s.13 Slavery remained legal, however, and pro‐slavery merchants and politicians attempted to keep it that way.

In 1790, a Black man named Peter Martin petitioned Governor Simcoe to act against a slave owner who had violently transported an enslaved Black woman, Chloe Cooley, from Upper Canada to the United States to be sold. This slave owner’s actions were entirely legal at the time, and this case seems to have inspired Simcoe to introduce the first anti‐slavery law in British North America.

Upper Canada passed an Act in 1793 intended to gradually end the practice of slavery. The law made it illegal to bring enslaved people into Upper Canada and declared that children born to enslaved people would be freed once they reached 25 years of age. It did not free any enslaved people directly, but any enslaved person who arrived in Upper Canada would be considered free.14 A similar act failed to pass in Lower Canada (now Quebec) thanks to pressure from influential slave owners – including elected representatives – who blocked it.

But even in the absence of outright prohibition, the legal status of slavery was weakening. Throughout the early 1800s, courts in various colonial jurisdictions (notably Lower Canada and Nova Scotia) ruled against slave owners and freed formerly enslaved people.15 On March 25, 1807, the slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire, including British North America.

1. This made it illegal to buy or sell human beings and so ended British participation in the transatlantic slave trade.
2. But it didn’t outlaw holding and exploiting enslaved people.
3. The overall practice of slavery was abolished everywhere in the British Empire in 1834.
4. Notably, Prince Edward Island had already pronounced the complete abolition of slavery in 1825.16 How can slaves be happy when they have the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back? And are disgraced and thought no more of than beasts? Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831) The abolition of slavery allowed the British colonies in North America to become a destination for escaped enslaved people in the United States who made their way North via the famous Underground Railroad.

This was an informal network of people, organizations, hiding places, homes, routes, transportation networks and tactics that supported freedom seekers in their clandestine escape from slavery. However, Black people in Canada still faced considerable racism in the colonies (later, a country) that had practiced slavery for over 200 years.

Racist attitudes and practices sharply limited Black people’s opportunities. Segregated education was legally enforced in Upper Canada in the 1850s.17 Informal segregation still marginalized Black people a hundred years later, when in education and at the theatre. Many other in the first half of the 20th century.

Until the Second World War, the vast majority of working Black women were restricted to being domestic servants.18 Some trade unions were explicitly anti‐Black through the 1950s. were the first Black workers to organize their own union to fight for better pay and working conditions.

1. Formal protection from racist education, employment, and housing restrictions only began to appear in the 1950s and 1960s.
2. Various provinces passed laws imposing fair employment practices and created bills of rights and the first human rights commissions.19 But as the Black Lives Matter movement shows, the struggle against anti‐Black racism continues in 21st century Canada.20 Slavery was legal and practiced in early Canada for longer than it has been abolished.

And many racist ideas, stereotypes, and practices that live on today have their roots in the dehumanization of Black people that justified and sustained the slave trade.21 Though formalized Black bondage was officially over, the meaning of Blackness had been consolidated under slavery.

1. Charles G. Roland, “Slavery” in the Oxford Companion to Canadian History, 585.
2. James A. Rawley. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, revised edition. Dexter, MI: Thomson‐Shore Inc., 2005: 7.
3. Robin Winks. The Blacks in Canada: A History, second edition. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997: 9.

1. Refers to “Pawnee,” an Indigenous nation which inhabited the basin of the Missouri River. “Slavery.” Virtual Museum of New France. Canadian Museum of History.22 August 2018.
2. Marcel Trudel. Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage, Trans. George Tombs. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 2013: 119–122.
3. Trudel, 57.
4. Afua Cooper. “Acts of Resistance: Black men and women engage slavery in Upper Canada, 1793–1803.” Ontario History 94.1 (Spring 2007): 5–17.
5. Harvey Amani Whitfield. North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes, Vancouver: UBS Press, 2016, 49.
6. Robyn Maynard. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2017, 23.
7. Winks, 53.
8. Trudel, 136.
9. Ken Alexander and Avis Glaze. Towards Freedom: The African‐Canadian Experience. Toronto: Umbrella Press, 1996: 29.
10. Trudel, 250ff.
11. “Significant events in Black Canadian history.” Black History Month. Canadian Heritage., Accessed 22 August 2018.
12. Winks, 99; Trudel, 240ff.
13. Harvey Amani Whitfield and Barry Cahill. “Slave Life and Slave Law in Colonial Prince Edward Island, 1769–1825.” Acadiensis 38 (2009). PEI was also unique in the British colonies in having explicitly made slavery legal in 1781. In the rest of British North America, slavery was upheld by treaties, common law and social acceptance rather than legislated slave codes.
14. Kristin McLaren, “‘We had no desire to be set apart’: Forced segregation of Black students in Canada West public schools and myths of British egalitarianism.” The History of Immigration and Racism in Canada: Essential Readings. Barrington Walker, ed. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2008.
15. Dionne Brand, “‘We weren’t allowed to go into factory work until Hitler started the war’: The 1920s to the 1940s.” The History of Immigration and Racism in Canada: Essential Readings. Barrington Walker, ed. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2008.
16. Winks, 428ff.
17. Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson, and Syrus Marcus Ware, eds. Until we are free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada, Regina, U Regina Press, 2020.
18. Maynard, passim.

• How do people talk about race and ethnicity in my community?
• When and where did I learn about slavery?
• How well known is the history of slavery in Canada?

For many years, the practice of indentured servitude existed alongside slavery in what is now Canada. Under the system of indentured servitude, individuals signed a contract committing perform unpaid labour for a set number of years in exchange for transport, shelter and food.

Indentured servitude was cruel and exploitative but very different to slavery. At the end of their contracts, indentured servants were free to go, and sometimes received a payment of land and goods. In contrast, slavery defined humans as property and involved lifelong forced labour. The children of enslaved people also became property, making slavery intergenerational.

Discover Black stories, voices, struggles and triumphs. Learn about personal and collective acts of resistance and the ongoing fight for equality. Suggested citation : Matthew McRae and Steve McCullough. “The story of Black slavery in Canadian history.” Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Published August 22, 2018. Updated February 16, 2023. https://humanrights.ca/story/story-black-slavery-canadian-history : The story of Black slavery in Canadian history | CMHR

What 3 European countries were involved in the fighting in Saint-Domingue?

Saint-Domingue quickly became one of the arenas of these European wars. Britain and Spain’s involvement threw much of the island back into chaos. British and Spanish troops joined the colonial militia and white, rebel, and affranchi armies vying for territory and power in the colony.

What were the 3 social classes in Haiti before the revolution?

Haiti SOCIAL STRUCTURE – Flags, Maps, Economy, History, Climate, Natural Resources, Current Issues, International Agreements, Population, Social Statistics, Political System As a result of the extinction of the indigenous population by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the population of preindependence Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) was entirely the product of the French colonists’ slaveholding policies and practices.

The major planters and government officials who constituted the ruling class carefully controlled every segment of the population, especially the majority of African slaves and their descendants. Society was structured for the rapid production of wealth for the planters and their investors in France (see, ch.6).

In the colonial period, the French imposed a three-tiered social structure. At the top of the social and political ladder was the white elite ( grands blancs ). At the bottom of the social structure were the black slaves ( noirs ), most of whom had been transported from Africa.

Between the white elite and the slaves arose a third group, the freedmen ( affranchis ), most of whom were descended from unions of slaveowners and slaves. Some mulatto freedmen inherited land, became relatively wealthy, and owned slaves (perhaps as many as one-fourth of all slaves in Saint-Domingue belonged to affranchis ).

Nevertheless, racial codes kept the affranchis socially and politically inferior to the whites. Also between the white elite and the slaves were the poor whites ( petits blancs ), who considered themselves socially superior to the mulattoes, even if they sometimes found themselves economically inferior to them.

Of a population of 519,000 in 1791, 87 percent were slaves, 8 percent were whites, and 5 percent were freedmen. Because of harsh living and working conditions, many slaves died, and new slaves were imported. Thus, at the time of the slave rebellion of 1791, most slaves had been born in Africa rather than in Saint-Domingue.

The Haitian Revolution changed the country’s social structure. The colonial ruling class, and most of the white population, was eliminated, and the plantation system was largely destroyed. The earliest black and mulatto leaders attempted to restore a plantation system that relied on an essentially free labor force, through strict military control (see, ch.6), but the system collapsed during the tenure of Alexandre Pétion (1806-18).

1. The Haitian Revolution broke up plantations and distributed land among the former slaves.
2. Through this process, the new Haitian upper class lost control over agricultural land and labor, which had been the economic basis of colonial control.
3. To maintain their superior economic and social position, the new Haitian upper class turned away from agricultural pursuits in favor of more urban-based activities, particularly government.

The nineteenth-century Haitian ruling class consisted of two groups, the urban elite and the military leadership. The urban elite were primarily a closed group of educated, comparatively wealthy, and French-speaking mulattoes. Birth determined an individual’s social position, and shared values and intermarriage reinforced class solidarity.

The military, however, was a means of advancement for disadvantaged black Haitians. In a shifting, and often uneasy, alliance with the military, the urban elite ruled the country and kept the peasantry isolated from national affairs. The urban elite promoted French norms and models as a means of separating themselves from the peasantry.

Thus, French language and manners, orthodox Roman Catholicism, and light skin were important criteria of high social position. The elite disdained manual labor, industry, and commerce in favor of the more genteel professions, such as law and medicine.

• A small, but politically important, middle class emerged during the twentieth century.
• Although social mobility increased slightly, the traditional elite retained their economic preeminence, despite countervailing efforts by François Duvalier.
• For the most part, the peasantry continued to be excluded from national affairs, but by the 1980s, this isolation had decreased significantly.

Still, economic hardship in rural areas caused many cultivators to migrate to the cities in search of a higher standard of living, thereby increasing the size of the urban lower class. Data as of December 1989 NOTE: The information regarding Haiti on this page is re-published from The Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Factbook.

What was the social structure of Saint-Domingue and why was it so unstable?

The social pyramid in Saint Domingue was unstable because it was based on race and skin color. There were many different factors that led to this instability: 1) The slaves were not content with their situation and wanted more rights (freedom).2) The whites were fighting amongst themselves over politics and power.

What was the main Saint-Domingue export?

Introduction – The French colony of Saint Domingue is now best known for the revolution that transformed it, between 1789 and 1803, into the independent state of Haiti. (See the Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History article ” The Haitian Revolution,”) During the previous century, however, it was renowned as one of the most productive export economies in the Americas.

Europe’s principal source of tropical produce, Saint Domingue was at different times the world’s leading exporter of sugar, coffee, and indigo. By the late 1780s, it rivaled Brazil as the main destination of the Atlantic slave trade and, although scarcely larger than Massachusetts, it had the third-largest slave population in the New World.

After a long association with buccaneering and tobacco farming in the 17th century, the colony turned to plantation agriculture around 1700. It quickly became the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean at a time when the region was at the height of its geostrategic importance.

The boom in international trade that it generated not only powered French commerce and industry, but also made a substantial contribution to the state treasury and underpinned the growth of the national navy. French aristocrats, merchants, and financiers invested in Saint Domingue, and it became the main site of emigration for French people of all social classes.

Its society grew at a breakneck pace and was extremely unbalanced between white and black. It was especially unusual for the size of its white working class and the number of wealthy residents of Euro-African descent. (See also the Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History article ” French Atlantic World,”)

What was the impact of Saint-Domingue?

Public Domain. An engraving depicting a scene at the Battle of Vertières during the Saint Domingue Revolution. The battle was fought between Haitian rebels and French expeditionary forces on 18 November 1803 at Vertières. B etween 1791 and 1804 the Saint-Domingue revolution in the West Indies led to the abolition of slavery in the former French colony and the establishment of Haiti, the second independent republic in the Western Hemisphere and the first Western nation governed by persons of African descent.

• The insurrection forced thousands of refugees, including many free people of color and white planters, to immigrate to Louisiana in the 1790s and early 1800s.
• Among the immigrants were planters and workers experienced in growing and refining sugar, an industry just emerging as a significant crop in Louisiana, as well as artisans skilled in a wide range of trades and crafts.

The Colonization of Saint-Domingue Saint-Domingue occupied approximately one-third of the western portion of Hispaniola, the island Christopher Columbus claimed for Spain in 1492. Spanish exploitation quickly reduced the native Arawakan population to such a degree that colonists had to import slaves from Africa.

The first Africans were brought to the island in 1502, beginning a slave trade that would profoundly shape the political and economic future of the Caribbean and the Americas. Small groups of French colonists began to appear in the West Indies shortly after the Spanish discovery, but it was not until 1664 that the newly established French West Indies Company wrested firm control of western Hispaniola from Spain.

In 1697 the Treaty of Ryswick between France and Spain formally recognized the French title to this western portion. Afterward, large numbers of French emigrants began to settle, particularly in the more accessible coastal areas of the mountainous island; about three-fourths of the island is made up of rugged mountains interspersed with fertile valleys.

Many of the early planters established hugely successful coffee, indigo, and sugar plantations. From the mid-eighteenth century until the French Revolution (1789–1799), Saint-Domingue prospered, becoming the richest colonial possession in the world and the basis for French colonial wealth in the West.

Its success, however, was built on enslaved African labor, and by the late 1750s the slave population of around five hundred thousand far outnumbered the white population of around thirty-two thousand. Fearing a revolution, the French created a rigid caste system dominated by grand blancs, white planters born in the colony (known as Creoles) and French-born bureaucrats and landowners.

1. Poor whites, or petit blancs, formed an underclass, while people of mixed ancestry and free men, known as affranchise, came next in the social hierarchy.
2. At the bottom were enslaved Africans.
3. White masters, who were outnumbered by enslaved workers, often used physical violence to maintain control and quell any chance of rebellion.

Slaves who left the plantations or disobeyed their owners were brutally whipped and sometimes subjected to more extreme forms of torture. Although France established the Code Noir in 1685 in an attempt to regulate the treatment of slaves in the colony, the code was rarely enforced.

Further, local legislators reversed parts of the code during the eighteenth century. Attempting to escape the brutality, large numbers of runaway slaves, called maroons, lived on the margins of large plantations and often stole supplies from their former masters. Other slaves fled to towns, blending in with the urban and freed slaves (free persons of color) living there.

When they were caught, these runaway slaves were severely and violently punished. The hard labor on sugar plantations also led to an extremely high death rate among the slaves who worked them. But with sugar profits so high, planters found it more cost effective to work enslaved people to death and replace them with new imported slaves.

• As a result, it is estimated that Saint-Dominque alone imported as much as 40,000 enslaved Africans annually and accounted for approximately one-third of the Atlantic slave trade.
• Effects of the French Revolution Despite the attempts of grand blancs to maintain control, violent conflicts between slaves and white landowners became more and more frequent.

The French Revolution in 1789 exacerbated this turmoil. When, in March 1790, the newly formed French National Assembly approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man, giving Saint-Domingue’s free people of color full rights as citizens, white planters refused to recognize the decision; instead, they saw it as an opportunity to gain political independence from France.

• These tensions led to increasing conflicts, between factions of whites at first and then between whites and free people of color.
• On August 22, 1791, the slaves of Saint-Domingue plunged the colony into a civil war and quickly took control of the important northern province of the country.
• The three principal black leaders of the rebellion were Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe, each of whom had served whites in various capacities, ranging from slave to French army officer.

In 1792 France sent a political delegate, Leger-Félicité Sonthonax, to stabilize the colony. He met with only limited success, even though he declared an end to slavery as of August 29, 1793. The effect of his declaration was minimal, as freedmen rebels in the northern provinces were not affected, and it was not enforced in the southern provinces.

When France declared war on England the same year, the white planters (grand blancs) quickly agreed to support Great Britain. Most of the slave forces backed Spain, which controlled the rest of Hispaniola, and joined its fight against France. When the British invaded Saint-Domingue, however, L’Ouverture told the French that he would fight on their side if they would agree to total emancipation of all enslaved persons.

French general Étienne Laveaux agreed to this demand, and, in May 1794 L’Ouverture and his army of former slaves fought for the French side, eventually restoring control of Saint-Domingue to France. After having effectively demonstrated his power, L’Ouverture proved reluctant to relinquish it.

Though he lacked an official title, L’Ouverture proceeded to oust local rivals, defeat a British force in 1798, and lead an invasion of neighboring Santo Domingo, where he freed the slaves in 1801. He also created a constitution for Saint-Domingue that decreed him governor for life. Intervention from France In retaliation for L’Ouverture’s actions, Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul of France, sent troops—led by his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc—to the island to restore French rule.

The troops had secret instructions to restore slavery at least in the part of the island formerly held by Spain. This expedition included eighty-six warships carrying twenty-two thousand troops, who had been instructed to reinforce the several thousand French troops already on the island.

1. Upon their arrival, they soon found themselves contending with malaria and yellow fever epidemics in addition to revolutionaries.
2. In November 1802 Leclerc died of yellow fever; his troops also fell victim to the epidemic.
3. French leaders promised L’Ouverture his freedom if he agreed to integrate his remaining troops into the French army, which he did in May 1802.

Despite L’Ouverture’s apparent fealty to France, the French did not keep their word: L’Ouverture was arrested and sent to France, where he died after several months in prison. The last battle of the Saint-Domingue revolution was fought on November 18, 1803, between rebels led by Dessalines and the decimated French forces commanded by Leclerc’s successor, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, Vicomte de Rochambeau.

It was no contest. The victorious Dessalines named himself “Emperor Jacques I” of the new republic and renamed it Haiti, which meant “land of mountains” in the indigenous Arawakan language. Effects on Louisiana The Saint-Domingue revolution had a great impact on Louisiana from the 1790s through the 1810s; first and foremost was France’s loss in its attempted re-conquest of the island during 1802 and 1803.

Napoleon had hoped to retake Saint-Dominque in order to revive the sugar trade and reestablish the island as a source of wealth for France. In 1800 he negotiated with Spain in the Treaty of San Iledefonso for the French possession of Louisiana, which would serve as a breadbasket for Saint-Dominque.

When French forces were defeated by Haitian rebels, Napoleon no longer needed the colony of Louisiana and decided to sell the entire colony to the United States in April 1803. Thomas Jefferson had sent emissaries Robert Livingston and James Monroe to negotiate with France for the sale of the Isle of Orleans (the City of New Orleans).

Napoleon, who realized he could use the sale to finance his planned campaign against Great Britain, then offered to sell the entire colony for $15 million. Livingston and Monroe agreed to the sale, and on December 20, 1803, Louisiana was officially transferred from French to US control.

• The revolution also had a great impact on Louisiana’s slave and immigration policies.
• In the 1790s Louisiana’s Spanish colonial Governor Francisco Luis Hector de Carondolet feared that immigrants from Saint-Domingue would import dangerous, revolutionary ideas, so he attempted to keep slaves and free people of color from the island from entering Louisiana.

The discovery of a planned slave rebellion on Julien Poydras’s plantation in Point Coupee in 1795 seemed to confirm this suspicion. Aware of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, Poydras’s slaves plotted to burn several buildings and then use the ensuing confusion as a way to seize weapons and kill their masters.

Though the rebellion was aborted, white anxieties about slave insurrections remained. Unwelcome in Louisiana initially, most of the whites, slaves, and free people of color who fled Saint-Domingue during the uprising went to other places in the Caribbean, particularly the eastern Cuban port of Santiago de Cuba.

As tensions between Spain and France over the Napoleonic wars escalated, these refugees found themselves unwelcome in Cuba by 1809. Louisiana Territorial Governor William C.C. Claiborne was reluctant to allow Saint-Domingue refugees into Louisiana. In 1809 and 1810 Claiborne believed that their presence would be a hindrance to the growth of American democratic principles.

At the same time, U.S. slave laws passed in 1807 prohibited the importation of slaves from outside the nation. On the one hand, Claiborne allowed enslaved persons—referred to as “servants” on ship manifests—into the Louisiana Territory to appease planters’ need for labor. On the other hand, Claiborne prohibited the immigration of free men of color but allowed free women of color passage.

Between the beginning of May and the end of July 1809 thirty-four vessels brought nearly 5,800 Saint-Domingue émigrés to Louisiana from Cuba; immigrants from Guadalupe and other Caribbean islands soon followed. In all, some ten thousand Saint-Domingue refugees arrived in Louisiana between 1809 and 1810.

• About one-third of them were white elite, another third were free people of color, and the remaining third were slaves, who belonged to either the whites or the free blacks.
• In 1811 the largest slave revolt in U.S.
• History, known as the Deslondes Revolt, occurred upriver from New Orleans.
• Once again, U.S.

authorities and planters blamed the revolt on the political effect of the Haitian revolution. While the rebellion was ultimately put down, the political legacy of Haiti’s success was great and far-reaching. The influx of Saint-Domingue refugees undeniably shaped Louisiana culture, particularly that of New Orleans.

• The number of free people of color in New Orleans doubled, as did the number of French speakers in the city.
• As a result, Louisiana Creoles generally encouraged such immigration, seeing the refugees as potential cultural allies in the struggle against Americanization.
• Some immigrants became citizens of great standing in the community.

Gilbert Joseph Pilie, for example, was a prominent Creole architect, surveyor, and civil engineer who made a lasting impact on New Orleans and Louisiana. He served as city surveyor, beginning in 1818, and mapped out the plan for the Esplanade Prolongment (Esplanade Avenue), which serves as the lower border of the French Quarter and connects the Mississippi riverfront to City Park.

• As an architect, he designed the main house at Oak Alley Plantation, perhaps one of the most iconic plantation homes in the country, for his son-in-law Jacques Telesphore Roman.
• He is also credited with designing the main iron gate of the Cabildo entrance and the iron fence around Jackson Square.
• The revolution also left a huge void in the global market for sugar—a void that Louisiana subsequently filled.

The large influx of Saint-Domingue immigrants helped to further develop Louisiana’s nascent sugar industry. In the late 1790s sugar planters, such as Etienne Bore, used Haitian refining techniques to successfully granulate sugar. This development made the crop more profitable.

1. Whereas tobacco and indigo were the principal plantation crops in the Spanish colonial period, by the American era sugar and cotton had emerged as the two most important export crops and fueled a great labor demand—and therefore a boom in the market for enslaved persons.
2. New Orleans’s signature dish, red beans and rice, is also credited to the Saint-Dominguans.

Immigrants from the island brought to New Orleans a preference for mixing large red kidney beans with rice and pork flavoring; in the city, it became a dish associated with Mondays, which were traditional wash days when a pot of beans could be easily cooked without much supervision, leaving time for tending to the day’s wash.

Today in Haiti riz national, the Creole dialect term for “national rice,” is the nation’s most popular rice-and-beans dish. And in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba, where many Saint-Dominguan immigrants settled in the 1800s, red beans and rice is still the local dish, which differs from black beans and rice (moros y cristianos), the signature dish of western Cuba.

The Saint-Domingue refugees also left a considerable cultural mark on New Orleans. Voodoo is often associated with both Haiti and New Orleans. The religion is essentially a syncretic blend of West African spiritual beliefs and Catholicism. In Louisiana, the Code Noir required all enslaved Africans to be baptized in the Catholic Church, and those who became Christian often blended their traditional spiritual beliefs with Catholic rituals.

• The influx of voodoo practitioners from Saint-Domingue in the early 1800s added another layer of voodoo culture, which became more prominent in the mid-1800s under priestess Marie Laveau and her daughter.
• Historian Emily Clark has argued that the New Orleans legends of the quadroon balls and plaçage were a consequence of the immigration as well.

Quadroon balls, in which balls only admitted free women of color and free white men, were practiced in Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, and the practice was employed to a limited degree in New Orleans during the 1810s. Travelers’ accounts of the balls and the practice of placage helped to associate the practice with the city and become part of New Orleans’s exaggerated and inaccurate history promoted by tour guides in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Why was the economy of Saint-Domingue dependent upon?

The economy of the Saint-Domingue colony was almost exclusively based on the export of plantation crops. The correct answer is mentioned below: A) Out of sugar plantations.

As a result, Option A is correct because the economy of the Saint-Domingue colony was almost exclusively based on the export of plantation crops.

Shortly before the Haitian Revolution, Saint-Domingue produced roughly 40% of the sugar and 60% of the coffee supplied to Europe. The economy of Saint-colonial Domingue was almost entirely based on the sugar business.

During the French empire, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the world’s wealthiest and richest colony.

Prior to the Haitian Revolution, Saint-Domingue provided Europe with around 40% of sugar and 60% of coffee.

The economy of the Saint-Domingue colony was almost exclusively based on the export of plantation crops.

What economic factors were involved in the Haitian Revolution?

Abstract: – Haiti is among the poorest nations in the world and it is the single poorest country in the western hemisphere. Yet, Haiti once possessed the exact opposite connotation. Haiti was once the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the wealthiest, most profitable colony in the world.

1. Saint-Domingue was France’s most prized possession and it became the prime destination for fortune seeking Frenchmen.
2. However, the vast majority of people did not benefit from the colony’s robust economy, as SaintDomingue became an economic powerhouse as a plantation economy based on slave labor.
3. In 1791, slaves and free blacks rebelled against their masters and the colonial administrators in order to claim freedom and equal rights for themselves.

The rebel forces defeated the French army in 1803, which made the Haitian Revolution the first successful slave revolt. Thus, on January 1, 1804, the rebels declared independence and created the modem nation of Haiti, the first black republic. The Haitian Revolution and the subsequent declaration of independence caused an economic decline that has left Haiti mired in poverty.

Several crucial factors caused this decline. First, the warfare of the Haitian Revolution destroyed the capital and infrastructure of the economy. Second, Haiti lacked diplomatic and trade relations with other nations. Third, Haiti lacked investment, both foreign and domestic investment. Fourth, Haiti moved toward subsistence farming and away from plantation agriculture.

Finally, reparation payments to France left the country deeply indebted. Haiti was unable to preserve or rebuild the wealth that Saint- Domingue once had, which made the country one of the poorest in the world today.

What type of economy was set up in Haiti?

Economy of Haiti

Port-au-Prince, the financial centre of Haiti
Currency	Haitian gourde (HTG)
Fiscal year	1 October – 30 September
Trade organizations	CARICOM, WTO
Country group	Least Developed Lower-middle income economy
Statistics
GDP	$8.347 billion (nominal, 2020) $19.704 billion ( PPP, 2020)
GDP rank	145th (nominal, 2020) 143rd (PPP, 2020)
GDP growth	1.5% (2018) −0.9% (2019e) −3.5% (2020f) 1.0% (2021f)
GDP per capita	$732 (nominal, 2020 est.) $1,728 ( PPP, 2020 est.)
GDP per capita rank	172nd (nominal, 2020) 174th (PPP, 2020)
GDP by sector	Agriculture 21.9% industry 20.8% services 57.3% (2017 est.)
Inflation ( CPI )	12.885% (2018)
Population below poverty line	58.5% (2012 est.)
Gini coefficient	41.1 medium (2012)
Human Development Index	0.510 low (2019) ( 170th ) 0.303 low IHDI (2019)
Labor force	4.594 million
Labor force by occupation	Agriculture 38.1% industry 11.5% services 50.4% (2010 est.)
Unemployment	13.2%
Main industries	Sugar refining, flour milling, textile, cement, light assembly, industries based on imported parts
Ease-of-doing-business rank	179th (below average, 2020)
External
Exports	$960.1 million (2017 est.)
Export goods	apparel, manufactures, essential oils (Vetiver), cocoa, mangoes, coffee, bitter oranges (Grand Marnier)
Main export partners	United States 81% Canada 7% (2019)
Imports	$3.621 billion (2017 est.)
Import goods	food, manufactured goods, machinery and transport equipment, fuels, raw materials
Main import partners	United States 39% China 22% Turkey 5% (2019)
FDI stock	$1.46 billion (31 December 2017 est.)
Gross external debt	$2.607 billion (31 December 2017 est.)
Public finances
Government debt	31.1% of GDP (2017 est.)
Revenues	$1.58 billion (2017 est.)
Expenses	$2.251 billion (2017 est.)
Economic aid	$600 million (FY04 est.)
Foreign reserves	$2.044 billion (31 December 2017 est.)
Main data source: CIA World Fact Book All values, unless otherwise stated, are in US dollars,

Haiti is a free market economy with low labor costs. A republic, it was a French colony before gaining independence in an uprising by its enslaved people. It faced embargoes and isolation after its independence as well as political crises punctuated by foreign interventions and devastating natural disasters.

Haiti’s estimated population in 2018 was 11,439,646. The Economist reported in 2010: “Long known as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, Haiti has stumbled from one crisis to another since the Duvalier ( François Duvalier ) years.” Haiti has an agricultural economy. Over half of the world’s vetiver oil (an essential oil used in high-end perfumes) comes from Haiti.

Bananas, cocoa, and mangoes are important export crops. Haiti has also moved to expand to higher-end manufacturing, producing Android-based tablets and current sensors and transformers. Its major trading partner is the United States (US), which provides the country with preferential trade access to the US market through the Haiti Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) and the Haiti Economic Lift Program Encouragement Acts (HELP) legislation.

• Vulnerability to natural disasters, as well as poverty and limited access to education are among Haiti’s most serious disadvantages.
• Two-fifths of all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, mainly small-scale subsistence farming, and remain vulnerable to damage from frequent natural disasters, exacerbated by the country’s widespread deforestation,

Haiti suffers from a severe trade deficit, which it is working to address by moving into higher-end manufacturing and more value-added products in the agriculture sector. Remittances are the primary source of foreign exchange, equaling nearly 20% of GDP.

What is Haiti economy based on?

Economic Overview Haiti is a free market economy with low labor costs and tariff-free access to the US for many of its exports. Two-fifths of all Haitians depend on the agricultural sector, mainly small-scale subsistence farming, which remains vulnerable to damage from frequent natural disasters.