Like many of the French West Indies territories, Haiti’s demographic composition fit the classic profile of a sugar-based colony resting on 3 components:
Under French colonial rule, enslaved people produced cash crops like cane sugar, indigo, coffee, tobacco, cotton, ginger, and cassava.
Political scientist Ronald Suny defines empire as an “unequal hierarchical relationship between a metropole (dominant state) and a periphery (dependent territory beyond that metropole).” The implied connection of empire with inequality coincides with the French treatment of Haitians, who reduced colonized people to stereotypes made to fit a grand design of supposedly benevolent French rule. These cultural constructions of difference (particularly those relating to race and ethnicity, in Haiti’s case) were often used as the ideological rationale for imperial control. With constant turnover rates, a high population of foreign-born enslaved Africans, and a lack of proper outlets for grievances, it should come as little surprise that many plantations in the Caribbean were hotbeds for unrest.
Haiti’s subsequent decolonization process from the French (an empire known for its interventionist approach to colonialism) created power vacuums as Frenchmen were expelled and elite dictators came to power, giving rise to even greater socio political turmoil.