America · Part 3

colony) was the richest French colony ( – ) in the Caribbean Sea. Its plantations produced more sugar than all of Europe’s other Caribbean and American colonies put together. The island’s indigenous population, forced to mine for gold, was devastated by European diseases and brutal working conditions, and by the end of the sixteenth century it had virtually vanished. Landowners in western Hispaniola imported increasing numbers of African slaves. By , the estimated , population of Saint-Domingue included , African slaves, , European colonists (whites), and , free affranchis or mulattoes (black- people of mixed African and European descent). News of the storming of the Bastille was followed by armed defiance of the royal governor. Vincent Ogé, a mulatto, who had lobbied with the Parisian assembly for colonial reforms, led an uprising in late but was captured and executed. In May the French revolutionary government granted citizenship to the wealthier mulattoes who had even Vincent Ogé Toussaint L’Ouverture The Age of Revolutions in that year re-conquered Venezuela and most of New Granada. Yet another invasion led by Bolívar in failed. The following year ( ) a larger and revitalised independence movement emerged, winning the struggle in the north and taking it into the Andean highlands. Bolivar emerged as a strong military and political force after the struggles. At this point a group of llaneros (cow boys) of mixed ethnicity led by Jose Antonia Paez joined the struggle and contributed decisively to the patriots’ military victories in – . After leading his army up the face of the eastern Andes, Bolívar dealt a crushing defeat to his enemies in the Battle of Boyaca. Battle of Boyaca Consolidating victory in the north proved difficult. A congress that Bolívar convened in Angostura in named Bolivar as president of Gran Colombia, a union of what are today Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. But the sharp divisions prevailing in the region ultimately dashed Bolívar’s hopes of uniting the former Spanish colonies into a single new nation as United States of Latin America. Furthermore, loyalist