Hispaniola’s Turn to Tobacco

Abstract

For a brief but intense period, the island of Hispaniola constituted the center of Spain’s discovery, conquest, and colonization of America and played a crucial historical role. Economically, from the start of the sixteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, the island underwent various phases with several features: monocultures of products as diverse as sugar cane in the sixteenth century and tobacco in the eighteenth century; a thriving plantation economy that produced exports to the Iberian Peninsula after immigrants arrived from the Canary Islands; and the benefits that accrued over time from the existence of the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the western part of the island, where livestock was sold in order to obtain slaves, cloth, and European manufactured products at prices much lower than the Hispanic merchants could provide them.