The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (by C. L. R. James) EDIT: this book was so good an organization of the "story" of how the slaves of San Domingo freed themselves and established their own, sovereign state while France, the would-be owner of the extremely valuable island so coveted by the rest of Europe's wealthy, was in the midst of its own revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, that I couldn't finish it without first reading one of the sources it gave such a delicious taste of (Thomas Clarkson's 138-page "Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade", itself an extremely engaging read). This book will draw you into history.
Ok The following are all good books. I've tried to have as many haitian authors as possible, but there are some good western authors mixed in.
Haitian history
https://www.amazon.com/Whom-Dogs-Spy-Dictatorships-Earthquake/dp/1628725400
​
Vodou
​
Some good contemporary documentaries
https://arnold-antonin-films.myshopify.com/collections/documentaries
This sounds a little revisionist. Classic text on the slave revolt in San Domingo (wasn't Haiti then) is here. The primary reason the country never prospered was then and remains internal strife akin to what we see following many revolutions today, an inability to develop an effective and functioning government. I'm sure embargos then would have made things much worse. Colonial nations then were incredibly threatened by the potential for slave revolts as their economies depended on slaves.