Haitian
Workers
Drummers at a Haitian Kombit, c. 1940
Photo by Melville J. Herskovits,
courtesy of Melville and Frances Herskovits Collection.
Hoers at a Haitian kombit, c. 1940
Photo by Melville J. Herskovits,
courtesy of Melville and Frances Herskovits Collection.
The plantation economies were based on several major crops including cotton, coffee, tobacco, indigo, and sugar. In the Caribbean and South America, sugar plantations created the greatest demand for African labor from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, profits from the trade in slaves and slave-produced sugar made Haiti the richest European colony in the Americas. Farming methods perfected during slavery, such as the Haitian kombit (a rotating cooperative approach to planting and harvesting, usually organized spontaneously), continued well into the twentieth century.