La Isabella replaces the burned fort with a Spanish town

Columbus founded La Isabella on 8 December 1493, on the northern coast of what is now the Dominican Republic. It replaced the burned fort at La Navidad with something far more substantial, laid out with a church, a storehouse and stone buildings for the officers. The site was chosen for its access to the gold bearing country of the Cibao, and that choice tells you the purpose. From La Isabella the Spanish ran the expeditions inland that broke the chiefdoms, imposed the tribute in gold dust that every adult Taino was ordered to deliver, and began the labour drafts that killed the people who could not pay it. The town was a poor place to live. Fever and hunger emptied it within five years and the capital moved south to Santo Domingo. Its short life covers exactly the period in which the destruction of the island's population became irreversible.

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.

Dupuy opens his account of the colony with a demographic collapse and the labour policy that followed it. He cites Madiou and Nau for a population estimated at more than a million in 1492 which had been reduced to sixty thousand by 1507. Unable to attract more emigrants from Spain, including convicts, the colonial settlers turned first to enslaving Lucayans from the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos and Caribs from the Lesser Antilles, and only then exclusively to Africa. As Spanish settlers left for South America and Mexico in search of quicker fortunes, the western third of the island became virtually abandoned, which made it easy for France to take it and to secure the transfer at Ryswick in 1697. Dupuy treats this as the beginning of a system whose only purpose was to produce commodities for profit.

The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 rested on an imaginary line created by Pope Alexander the Sixth which divided the Atlantic from north to south and settled the dispute between Spain and Portugal over the possessions of the New World. The Treaty of Saragossa of 1529 performed the same operation for the Indias Orientales, dividing them between the same two emerging empires. These two documents are the beginning of the practice of partitioning the planet on paper, which ran without interruption to the scramble for Africa among western European states at the end of the nineteenth century and into the First World War. The line drawn in 1494 is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and the rest of South America speaks Spanish. It also established that the earth could be allotted by agreement between Christian monarchs, with the people living on it treated as part of the property being divided.