1697-09-20: (The Treaty of Ryswick, by Which Spain Formally Cedes the Western Third of Hispaniola to France, Creating the Colony of Saint-Domingue That Would…

1697-09-20: (The Treaty of Ryswick, by Which Spain Formally Cedes the Western Third of Hispaniola to France, Creating the Colony of Saint-Domingue That Would Become the Wealthiest and Most Brutal Plantation Colony in the World): On September 20, 1697, the Treaty of Ryswick officially granted the western third of Hispaniola to France, formalizing what decades of buccaneering and settlement had already established on the ground. The territory became the colony of Saint-Domingue. Within a century, it would produce more wealth than any other colony in the world: forty percent of all the sugar and sixty percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe came from this single territory, worked by over half a million enslaved Africans whose labor, suffering, and death subsidized the refinement of French civilization. The Treaty of Ryswick created the legal entity that the Revolution would destroy. It also created the geographical boundaries that would define the Republic of Haiti.