Sugarcane came to Hispaniola with the earliest Spanish colonists. The island's first mill is generally dated to 1504, near Concepción de la Vega, and by 1517 Dr. Gonzalo de Velosa had built the first commercial-scale operation at Nigua, importing both skilled millwrights and water-powered milling technology from the Canary Islands. Within a generation the colony had a real industry: twenty-three sugar estates were operating by 1533, and twenty-four by 1545.

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That first boom did not last. Spanish trade policy, competition from cattle ranching, contraband, and the disruption of the slave trade all took a toll from the 1570s onward, and a Spanish crown ban on foreign trade sent much of the colony's agricultural investment toward livestock instead. Sugar became a marginal, subsistence-scale activity for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — a situation that worsened after Spain ceded the eastern two-thirds of the island to France in 1795 and, later, during the 1822–1844 Haitian occupation, when the abolition of slavery led most remaining Dominican mills to stop refined production and process only molasses.

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Political instability after Dominican independence in 1844 kept the industry marginal for another generation. The real revival did not begin until the final years of the 1870s.