Short answers, pulled from the story.
Saint-Domingue was a French colony occupying the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in the area of modern-day Haiti, from 1659 to 1803. Its name derived from the Spanish city of Santo Domingo on the same island.
By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. By 1789, the colony produced roughly half of all the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the Americas combined, more than all the British West Indies colonies put together.
Between 1681 and 1791, an estimated 790,000 to 860,000 enslaved people were brought to Saint-Domingue. In the period from 1783 to 1791 alone, the colony absorbed a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade, receiving more than 30,000 enslaved people a year from 1787 onward.
Mackandal was a one-armed enslaved man from the Guinea region of Africa who escaped in 1751 and became a Vodou priest and maroon leader in Saint-Domingue. He united maroon bands and staged raids for six years, reportedly killing more than 6,000 people, before being captured after a failed plot to poison planters' water supplies. He was burned alive in the public square of Cap-Français in 1758.
On the 17th of April 1825, French king Charles X issued a decree recognizing Haitian independence on the condition that Haiti pay 150 million francs, a sum more than ten times Haiti's annual budget and ten times what the United States had paid France for the Louisiana Territory. Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer signed the document on the 11th of July 1825 under the threat of a French naval squadron carrying more than 500 cannons.
Vodou in Saint-Domingue combined Catholic liturgy and ritual with the religious practices of the Vodun traditions from Guinea, Congo, and Dahomey. Colonial authorities banned its practice and drove it underground, but enslaved people used it for healing, communal identity, and cultural continuity. The ceremony at Bois Caïman in 1791, which helped launch the Haitian Revolution, was a Vodou gathering.