Witch hunting manuals teach that the Devil hands out poison recipes

The Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 and Daemonolatreiae libri tres of 1595 both described witches learning to make poisons through their pact with the Devil. That tied two ideas together for centuries. European elites already held that the Devil recruited women more readily than men, so poison became the crime the popular imagination gave to wives, servants and rivals, people striking from weakness at someone stronger. Village fear and clerical theory pulled apart. Neighbours accused local healers of causing harm and answered with counter magic, while churchmen held that a cure achieved by such means was itself demonic. The prosecutions at their height in the late sixteenth century swept up cunning folk for exactly that reason. The gendered script outlived the trials. Portuguese and French dictionaries of the early eighteenth century still explained sorcery as a female act of envy, and the assumption crossed the Atlantic on the same ships as the colonists.

In the 1490s the Portuguese planted sugar on Sao Tome, an island in the Gulf of Guinea a few hundred kilometres off the African mainland. The island had no population of its own before they arrived, so everyone who worked there was brought there. Captives came from the nearby coast and from the kingdom of Kongo, and within a generation Sao Tome was among the largest sugar producers anywhere. Every element of the system that would later run Saint-Domingue was present: a single crop grown for a distant market, a mill and a boiling house at the centre of the estate, an enslaved African workforce with no prospect of returning home, a small European management class, and revolt. Enslaved people escaped into the island's interior and raided the plantations from it. Sugar built the wealth and marronage answered it, on an African island, before any Caribbean plantation existed. Planters who later crossed the Atlantic did not arrive as beginners.

The island its inhabitants called Ayiti was baptised Hispaniola by Columbus in 1492. What followed there was genocide, and it belongs to the same sixteenth century transformation that connected European ventures across the Atlantic, carried enslaved Africans into the Americas and dismantled Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac. Out of that came a structure for controlling authority, economy, subjectivity and the norms of gender and sexual relations, driven by the Atlantic Europeans of the Iberian peninsula, Holland, France and England, in their quarrels with each other as much as in their exploitation of labour and their seizure of land. Africans and the peoples of the Americas took no part in setting the rules. The name Ayiti was recovered in 1804 by people who had been brought to the island in chains three centuries after its first inhabitants were destroyed, and who chose the word the destroyed had used.

Hispaniola was forested when Columbus arrived and held more than six thousand plant species. Less than two percent of Haiti carries forest today. The decline is documented and its mechanism is dull. Around sixty percent of the country was still wooded in 1920. The population grew through the twentieth century, no electricity or gas supply was built for ordinary households, and people cooked with charcoal, which is made by cutting trees. Cover fell below twenty five percent by 1980 and has kept falling. Each stage feeds the next. Bare slopes lose soil, thin soil grows less food, poorer families burn more charcoal. Rain that intact forest would have absorbed now runs off in mudslides that kill people in their houses. USAID has planted more than sixty million trees in Haiti since 1990 and most of them have been cut for fuel, because nobody supplied the cooking energy the trees were being burned to provide. Planting without fuel is a way of looking busy.