History of Haiti
Following the arrival of Europeans, La Hispaniola's indigenous population suffered greatly to near extinction, in possibly the worst case of depopulation in the Americas. A commonly accepted hypothesis attributes the high mortality of this colony in part to European diseases to which the natives had no immunity. A small number of Taínos were able to survive and set up villages elsewhere. Spanish interest in Hispaniola began to wane in the 1520s, as more lucrative gold and silver deposits were found in Mexico and South America. Thereafter, the population of Spanish Hispaniola grew at a slow pace.
Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies
When Spain first enslaved Native Americans on Hispaniola, and then replaced them with captive Africans, it established unfree labor as the basis for colonial mass-production. It was believed by Europeans that Africans had developed immunities to European diseases, and would not be as susceptible to fall ill as the Native Americans because they had not been exposed to the pathogens yet. In 1501, Spanish colonists began importing enslaved Africans from the Iberian Peninsula to their Santo Domingo colony on the island of Hispaniola. These first Africans, who had been enslaved in Europe before crossing the Atlantic, may have spoken Spanish and perhaps were even Christians. About 17 of them started in the copper mines, and about a hundred were sent to extract gold. As introduced diseases decimated Caribbean indigenous populations in the first decades of the 1500s, enslaved Blacks from Africa ("bozales") gradually replaced their labor, but they also mingled and joined in flights from slavery, creating mixed maroon communities in all the islands where Europeans had established chattel slavery. The newly enslaved workers continued to arrive in Spanish colonies as colonials imported them directly from Portuguese traders, who in turn purchased them from African traders on the Atlantic coast. With the increased dependency on enslaved Blacks developed also distinctive racial hierarchy and the hardening of racial ideologies, buttressed by prior ideologies of differentiation as that of the Limpieza de Sangre (en: Blood Purity). In the vocabulary of the time, each enslaved African who arrived at the Americas was called "Pieza de Indias" (en: a piece of India). Asiento (en: chair) was the name for the agreement between the Spanish authorities and slave traders. During the 16th century, the Spanish colonies were the most important customers of the Atlantic slave trade, claiming several thousands in sales, but the Dutch, French and British soon dwarfed these numbers when their demand for enslaved workers began to drive the slave market to unprecedented levels.