The recorded history of the Dominican Republic began in 1492 when Christopher Columbus, working for the Crown of Castile, arrived at a large island in the western Atlantic Ocean, later known as the Caribbean. The native Taíno people, an Arawakan people, had inhabited the island during the pre-Columbian era, dividing it into five chiefdoms. They referred to the eastern part of the island as Quisqueya, meaning 'mother of all lands.' Columbus claimed the island for Castile, naming it La Isla Española ('the Spanish Island'), which was later Latinized to Hispaniola.
Following 25 years of Spanish occupation, the Taíno population in the Spanish-controlled regions of the island drastically decreased due to the Taíno genocide. With fewer than 50,000 survivors, those remaining intermixed with Spaniards, Africans, and others, leading to the formation of the present-day tripartite Dominican population. The area that would become the Dominican Republic remained the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo until 1821, except during the Era de Francia, when it was a French colony from 1795 to 1815. It briefly became an independent state in 1821, known as the Republic of Spanish Haiti, until it was annexed and merged by Haiti into Republic of Haiti from 1822 to 1844.
In 1844, the Dominican Republic declared its independence, establishing the First Dominican Republic. The republic maintained its independence except for a brief annexation by Spain from 1861 to 1865, after which the Second Dominican Republic was established. The country later experienced its first occupation by the United States from 1916 to 1924, followed by the establishment of the Third Dominican Republic.
During the 19th century, the Dominican Republic frequently engaged in conflicts involving the French, Haitians, Spanish, and internal factions. This period was characterized by a society heavily influenced by caudillos, who exercised control over the nation as a personalised dictatorship. Between 1844 and 1914, the Dominican Republic underwent numerous leadership transitions, with 53 individuals assuming the presidency, although only three completed their terms. The country also saw the adoption of 19 constitutions, with many leaders obtaining power through military force. During this period, three presidents were assassinated: José Antonio Salcedo in 1864, Ulises Heureaux in 1899, and Ramón Cáceres in 1911.
In 1930, the Dominican Republic came under the rule of Rafael Trujillo, a dictator who maintained control until his assassination in 1961. Following Trujillo's regime, Juan Bosch was democratically elected president in 1962 but was removed from office in a military coup d'état in 1963. The Dominican Civil War in 1965 lead to a U.S.-led intervention prompted by an uprising to restore Bosch to power and allegations of communist support for the coup. In 1966, Joaquín Balaguer, a caudillo, defeated Bosch in the presidential election and remained in power for 30 years. Due to U.S. pressure in response to flawed elections, Balaguer was compelled to shorten his term in 1996.
Subsequent to this period, the Dominican Republic has conducted regular competitive elections, with opposition candidates successfully assuming the presidency, showing a transition towards more stable democracy.
Pre-European history
The islands of the Caribbean were first settled around 6,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer peoples originating from Central America or northern South America. The Arawakan-speaking ancestors of the Taíno moved into the Caribbean from South America during the 1st millennium BC, reaching Hispaniola by around 600 AD. These Arawakan peoples engaged in farming, fishing, hunting and gathering, and the widespread production of ceramic goods. The estimates of Hispaniola's population in 1492 vary widely, including tens of thousands, 100,000, 300,000, and 400,000-2,000,000. Estimating how many people lived on the island in pre-Columbian times is challenging, as no accurate records exist. At the time of Columbus' arrival in 1492, the island's territory consisted of five Taíno chiefdoms: Marién, Maguá, Maguana, Jaragua, and Higüey. These were ruled respectively by caciques Guacanagarix, Guarionex, Caonabo, Bohechío, and Cayacoa. The Taíno name for the entire island was either Ayiti (land of high mountains) or Quisqueya (mother of all lands).
Spanish colony (1492–1795)
Arrival of the Spanish
Christopher Columbus reached the island of Hispañola on his first voyage, in December 1492. Guacanagarí, the chief who hosted Columbus and his men, treated them kindly and provided them with everything they desired. However, the Taínos' egalitarian social system clashed with the Europeans' feudalist system, which had more rigid class structures. The Europeans believed the Taínos to be either weak or misleading, and they began to treat the tribes with violence. Columbus successfully tempered this trend, and he and his men departed from Quisqueya, the Taínos' name for the island, on good terms.
After the sinking of the Santa María, Columbus established a small fort to support his claim to the island. The fort was called La Navidad because the shipwrecking and the founding of the fort occurred on Christmas Day. While Columbus was away, the garrison manning the fort was wracked by divisions that evolved into conflict. The more rapacious men began to terrorize the Taíno, the Ciguayo, and the Macorix peoples, which included attempts to take their women. Guacanagarix tried to reach an accommodation with the Spaniards; however, the Spaniards and some of his own people viewed him as weak. The Spaniards treated him with contempt, including the kidnapping of some of his wives. Fed up, the powerful Cacique Caonabo of the Maguana Chiefdom attacked the Europeans and destroyed La Navidad. Guacanagarix was dismayed by these events but did not try hard to aid the Europeans, probably hoping that the troublesome outsiders would never return.
In 1493, Columbus came back to the island on his second voyage and founded the first Spanish colony in the New World, the city of La Isabela. Isabela nearly failed because of hunger and disease. In 1496, Santo Domingo was built and became the new capital, and remains the oldest continuously inhabited European city in the Americas.
An estimated 400,000 Tainos living on the island were soon enslaved to work in gold mines. By 1508, their numbers had decreased to around 60,000 because of forced labor, hunger, disease, and the Taíno genocide. By 1535, only a few dozen were still alive.
During this period, the colony's Spanish leadership changed several times. When Columbus departed on another exploration, Francisco de Bobadilla became governor. Settlers' allegations of mismanagement by Columbus helped create a tumultuous political situation. In 1502, Nicolás de Ovando replaced de Bobadilla as governor, with an ambitious plan to expand Spanish influence in the region. It was he who dealt most brutally with the Taíno people. The Taino population declined by up to 95% in the century after the Spanish arrival, from a pre contact population of tens of thousands to 8,000,000. Many authors have described the treatment of the Taino in Hispaniola under the Spanish Empire as genocide.
In 1511, Antonio de Montesinos denounced the abuses against the indigenous people.
One rebel, however, successfully fought back. Enriquillo led a group who fled to the mountains and attacked the Spanish repeatedly for fourteen years. The Spanish ultimately offered him a peace treaty and gave Enriquillo and his followers their own town in 1534.
Sixteenth century
In 1501, the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand I and Isabella, first granted permission to the colonists of the Caribbean to import African slaves, who began arriving to the island in 1503. In 1510, the first sizable shipment, consisting of 250 Black Ladinos, arrived in Hispaniola from Spain. Eight years later African-born slaves arrived in the West Indies. The Colony of Santo Domingo was organized as the Royal Audiencia of Santo Domingo in 1511. Sugar cane was introduced to Hispaniola from the Canary Islands, and the first sugar mill in the New World was established in 1516, on Hispaniola. The need for a labor force to meet the growing demands of sugar cane cultivation led to an exponential increase in the importation of slaves over the following two decades. The sugar mill owners soon formed a new colonial elite and convinced the Spanish king to allow them to elect the members of the Real Audiencia from their ranks. Poorer colonists subsisted by hunting the herds of wild cattle that roamed throughout the island and selling their hides.
The first major slave revolt in the Americas occurred in Santo Domingo on December 25, 1521, when enslaved Muslims of the Wolof nation led an uprising in the sugar plantation of admiral Don Diego Colon, son of Christopher Columbus. Many of these insurgents managed to escape to the mountains where they formed independent maroon communities, but the Admiral had a lot of the captured rebels hanged. Latter that decade, there were other rebellions of enslaved Africans.
While sugar cane dramatically increased Spain's earnings on the island, large numbers of the newly imported slaves fled into the nearly impassable mountain ranges in the island's interior, joining the growing communities of cimarrónes—literally, 'maroon'. By the 1530s, cimarrón bands had become so numerous that in rural areas the Spaniards could only safely travel outside their plantations in large armed groups. When Archdeacon Alonso de Castro toured Hispaniola in 1542, he estimated the maroon population at 2,000–3,000 persons, living mainly on the Cape of San Nicolas, in the Ciguayos, on the Samana peninsular, and on the Cape of Iguey.
Beginning in the 1520s, the Caribbean Sea was raided by increasingly numerous French corsairs. In 1541, Spain authorized the construction of Santo Domingo's fortified wall, and in 1560 decided to restrict sea travel to enormous, well-armed convoys. In another move, which would destroy Hispaniola's sugar industry, in 1561 Havana, more strategically located in relation to the Gulf Stream, was selected as the designated stopping point for the merchant flotas, which had a royal monopoly on commerce with the Americas. In 1564, the island's main inland cities Santiago de los Caballeros and Concepción de la Vega were destroyed by an earthquake.
With the conquest of the American mainland, Hispaniola quickly declined. Most Spanish colonists left for the silver-mines of Mexico and Peru, while new immigrants from Spain bypassed the island. Agriculture dwindled, new imports of slaves ceased, and white colonists, free blacks, and slaves alike lived in poverty, weakening the racial hierarchy and aiding intermixing, resulting in a population of predominantly mixed Spaniard, African, and Taíno descent. Except for the city of Santo Domingo, which managed to maintain some legal exports, Dominican ports were forced to rely on foreign contraband trade, which, along with livestock, became the sole source of livelihood for the island dwellers.
In 1586, the privateer Francis Drake of England captured the city of Santo Domingo, collecting a ransom for its return to Spanish rule. In 1592, Christopher Newport of England attacked the town of Azua on the bay of Ocoa, which was taken and plundered.
Seventeenth century
In 1605, Spain was infuriated that Spanish settlements on the northern and western coasts of the island were carrying out large scale and illegal trade with the Dutch, who were at that time fighting a war of independence against Spain in northern Europe, and the English, a very recent enemy state, and so decided to forcibly resettle the colony's inhabitants closer to the city of Santo Domingo. This action, known as the Devastaciones de Osorio, proved disastrous; more than half of the resettled colonists died of starvation or disease, over 100,000 cattle were abandoned, and many slaves escaped. Five of the existing thirteen settlements on the island were brutally razed by Spanish troops – many of the inhabitants fought, escaped to the jungle, or fled to the safety of passing Dutch ships. The settlements of La Yaguana, and Bayaja, on the west and north coasts respectively of modern-day Haiti were burned, as were the settlements of Monte Cristi and Puerto Plata on the north coast and San Juan de la Maguana in the southwestern area of the modern-day Dominican Republic.
French and English buccaneers took advantage of Spain's retreat into a corner of Hispaniola to settle the island of Tortuga, off the northwest coast of Hispaniola, in 1629. France established direct control in 1640, reorganizing it into an official colony and expanding to the north coast of Hispaniola itself, whose western end Spain ceded to France in 1697 under the Treaty of Ryswick.
In 1655, Oliver Cromwell dispatched an English fleet, commanded by Admiral Sir William Penn, to capture Santo Domingo. After meeting heavy resistance, the fleet withdrew. Penn's fleet proceeded to capture the nearby Spanish colony of Santiago, which became known as Jamaica and other foreign strongholds subsequently began to be established throughout the West Indies. Madrid sought to contest such encroachments on its own imperial control by using Santo Domingo as a forward military base, but Spanish power was by now too depleted to recapture lost colonies. The city itself was furthermore subjected to a smallpox epidemic, cacao blight, and hurricane in 1666; another storm two years later; a second epidemic in 1669; a third hurricane in September 1672; plus an earthquake in May 1673 that killed twenty-four residents.
Eighteenth century
The House of Bourbon replaced the House of Habsburg in Spain in 1700 and introduced economic reforms. Santo Domingo's isolation from Spain and economic decline under failed Bourbon Reforms created widespread poverty and trade collapse. This led some of its residents to participate in crown-licensed privateering in the eighteenth century. Dominican privateers primarily captured English and Dutch sloops and schooners, mainly in the waters around Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico.
The population of Santo Domingo grew from about 6,000 in 1737 to approximately 125,000 in 1790. Of this number, about 40,000 were white landowners, about 25,000 were mulatto freedmen, and some 60,000 were slaves. However, it remained poor and neglected, particularly in contrast with its western, French neighbor Saint-Domingue, which became the wealthiest colony in the New World and had half a million inhabitants.
The colonial elites of St. Domingue offered the principal market for Santo Domingo's exports of beef, hides, mahogany, and tobacco. With the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, the rich urban families linked to the colonial bureaucracy fled the island, while most of the rural hateros (cattle ranchers) remained, even though they lost their principal market. Spain saw in the unrest an opportunity to seize all, or part, of the western third of the island in an alliance of convenience with the rebellious slaves. But after the slaves and French reconciled, the Spanish suffered a setback, and in 1795, France gained control of the whole island under the Treaty of Basel.