A fish camp on Grand Turk with no fish bodies left in it

Zooarchaeologists sorting the animal bone from Governors Beach on Grand Turk found it dominated by the heads of grunts, with almost nothing from the rest of the fish. A catch does not arrive headless, so the bodies left the island. Preserving them by smoking or salting and shipping them to the settlements of Hispaniola accounts for the pattern, and it makes this site a processing station rather than a village. Everything else about the place agrees. The occupation is seasonal, the deposits are shallow, and the work done here was specialised. Running such a station means sending people and canoes across open sea, keeping them supplied while they work, and moving preserved food back along the same route. Groups based in the Greater Antilles were operating a maritime territory extending well beyond the islands they lived on, and managing it as a system. The refuse of a fish camp is enough to demonstrate the whole arrangement.

The Fourth Crusade took Constantinople in 1204, and merchants from Genoa and Venice used the opening to set up ports on the northern shore of the Black Sea where they could buy people. They kept at it for two and a half centuries. The captives were Armenians, Circassians, Tatars and Bulgarians, and European clerks lumped them together under the loose heading of Slavs, which is where the word slave entered the languages of western Europe. Where those people went matters as much as who they were. A good number were put to work growing and milling sugar on Cyprus and Sicily, an operation that needed gangs of labour under supervision through a fixed season. The plantation with a bound workforce on it was therefore a working European business two centuries before anyone crossed the Atlantic. When it was carried to Madeira, then to Hispaniola, then to Saint-Domingue, nothing about it had to be invented. It had to be enlarged, and the supply had to be found somewhere else.

Kankan Moussa ruled Mali from 1297 to 1332 and made his name on the road to Mecca. He met men of learning at the holy places and attached them to his service. Among them were es Sahali, a poet of Arab and Spanish formation, and the historian El Mamer. He carried both back to the Sudan and used them in the administration of his empire, and under their direction the two mosques of Timbuktu and of Gao were raised, Gao being then attached to Mali. The Arab geographer Ibn Battuta left a close description of the customs and ceremonial of the Malian court: the luxury the emperors displayed, the order and regularity of the administrative services, the observance of Koranic rule. Taken together the accounts describe a state with revenue, protocol, architecture and a documented court, at the same moment when Europe was assembling its own. Mali lay south of the Mossi country, on the plateau above the forest.

Speakers of Old French inherited a noun, puison, from the Latin word for a drink, and it kept both the senses Latin had carried. A puison could be a medicine and it could kill. Around 1130 they built something new out of it, the verb empoisonner, which meant to kill by poison and carried no other sense. By the end of the thirteenth century they had added a noun for the person who did it. Anglo Norman speakers took the verb across the channel in the fourteenth century, shortened it, and made their own word for the doer. The direction of the change is the evidence. Nobody needed a verb meaning to give medicine. People needed a word for a particular fear, and once the word for the person existed, the person existed as a type. The French colonists who reached the Caribbean four centuries later brought this vocabulary with them and applied it to the enslaved.