A workshop at Governors Beach turns out fifteen hundred scarlet beads

The site at Governors Beach was a bead factory. Excavation recovered more than 1,500 finished beads and 4,400 blanks, all cut from the bright scarlet siphon shells of Chama. The toolkit behind that output was assembled from several sources. Nippers came from the queen conch, Lobatus gigas, platforms of manufactured concrete were used for polishing, and the drill bits were tipped with chert brought in from elsewhere, because a hole through a small shell bead needs a point that will not blunt. The raw material was chosen deliberately. Colour taken from the outer skin of the conch fades quickly, while Chama holds its red for centuries, and a bead that stays bright is a bead worth giving. Production on this scale was not for local use. These were prestige goods made for exchange across the Caribbean, worn to show rank and passed along to hold lineages and alliances together. Somebody in the Turks and Caicos was manufacturing status for export.

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.

By about 1200 the societies of the Greater Antilles were building stone lined ball courts, and the courts are how archaeologists mark the arrival of what they call the Formative age. A ball court is a permanent public work. It has to be sited, cleared, lined with worked stone and then maintained, and it exists only where somebody can command labour for a project that grows no food. What happened in these courts was the political and religious life of a chiefdom: games between communities, ceremonies, the settling of rank and obligation in front of an audience. The chiefdoms the Spanish met on Hispaniola three centuries later, with paramount caciques, tribute and inherited standing, were the mature form of this arrangement. Those institutions had been under construction here for three hundred years before any European described them, and the ball courts are what remains of the places where people gathered to watch them work.