ABSTRACT
The Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, but the two countries are culturally and musically quite different. When Spain discovered the high cultures and treasures of Mexico (1519) and Peru (1532), it left Hispaniola to languish as a colonial backwater. This policy allowed France to gain a foothold in the island, leading to the 1697 treaty that ceded to France the western third of Hispaniola, called Saint-Domingue as a translation of Santo Domingo, the name of the Spanish colony, which became the Dominican Republic on achieving independence (1844). France commenced to develop Saint-Domingue as the jewel in its colonial crown. By about 1530, with the island’s exploitable gold exhausted and the indigenous population drastically reduced, the basis of the accrual of wealth shifted to agriculture, primarily sugarcane cultivation, carried out by African slaves. The millions of Africans brought by the French into Saint-Domingue and their ethnic origins led to the development of a society more densely populated than and culturally different from neighboring Santo Domingo.
