Four slave trades run at once for five hundred years

Between 1400 and 1900 the African continent was subject to four slave trades running at the same time. The best known is the trans-Atlantic trade, which from the fifteenth century carried people from West Africa, West Central Africa and East Africa to European colonies in the Americas and accounted for roughly twelve million exports. The trans-Saharan trade moved people north across the desert. The Red Sea trade sent them to the Middle East and to India. The Indian Ocean trade took people from East Africa to the Middle East, to India and to plantation islands. Those three were older than the Atlantic trade and together account for about another six million. None of these figures counts the people killed during raids or those who died on the march to the coast. Patrick Manning calculated that by 1850 Africa's population stood at half of what it would otherwise have been. Formal colonial rule, for comparison, ran from 1885 to about 1960.

Laurent Dubois opens his history of the Haitian Revolution with the arrival of Columbus on the northern shore of the island on 5 December 1492 and with the name he gave it, La Isla Espanola. Europeans had touched other islands in the preceding weeks and sailed on. This time they stayed, and no year since has passed without a European or a European derived state claiming authority over some part of this ground. The island now carries two countries with different languages, different histories and a shared border running some three hundred and eighty kilometres. Haiti holds the western third and speaks Kreyol and French. The Dominican Republic holds the east and speaks Spanish. Both date from what happened after this landing, and the line between them was drawn later by European powers dividing the island between Spain and France. One afternoon on a beach in December is the common ancestor of two national histories that spend much of their time insisting they are unrelated.

On 28 November 1493 Columbus returned to find La Navidad burned to the ground and all thirty nine men he had left there dead. The reason was obscure to nobody on the island. The garrison had spent the year seizing food, taking women and roaming the interior after gold, and the people whose country it was put a stop to it. Columbus filed the event under indigenous savagery and used it to justify what came next, which was war on the chiefdoms and the forced labour system that emptied the island. That interpretation stuck for centuries and it is still doing work. Whenever a colonised population fights back, the record produced by the coloniser reclassifies the fighting as the natural violence of the people being fought. Haiti met this again in 1791, when a rising against the most lethal labour regime in the Americas was reported in Paris and Philadelphia as a race massacre. The template was cut here.

The Code Noir was drafted under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister who built Louis XIV's navy and his colonial administration, and it reads like the work of a capable bureaucrat. Owners had to be Roman Catholic. Every enslaved person had to be baptised. Sunday work was prohibited. Torture was prohibited. Masters owed their people food, clothing and care in sickness and in age. Anyone freed acquired the standing of a colonial subject. The same code expelled all Jews from French territory overseas. In Saint-Domingue the protective clauses were treated as advice. The planters there worked from an arithmetic later called the planter's policy: an adult brought from Africa cost less to replace than to keep alive, so the cheaper course was to exhaust people and buy more. France could hold up its statute book as evidence that it governed like a civilised power while men holding its commissions ran the harshest slave regime in the hemisphere. The distance between the printed article and the cane field is where colonial power actually operates.