Dahomey keeps one dynasty until the French conquest of 1894

Dahomey held a small stretch of the Guinea coast and outranked its neighbours by organisation. Society was cut into four classes, the nobility, the great officials, the people and the slaves, all of them Danhomenou, people or things of Dahomey and property of the king. The army was divided by service and held to strict discipline. Europe heard mainly about the grande coutume, the annual killing of scores of war captives offered to the souls of royal ancestors. Held together by that political, family and religious machinery, the kingdom stayed independent under a single dynasty and feared by its neighbours from the sixteenth century until the French conquest of 1894 dethroned its last king. In Dahomey the spirits are called vodoun, and ritual formulas recorded there run almost word for word beside the language used by Haitian practitioners. Dahomeans shipped to Saint Domingue were leaders of men and doctors of the faith at once, and their word became the name of the whole.

Nicolas de Ovando reached Hispaniola in 1502 as governor, bringing two thousand five hundred colonists, among them the first European families to settle anywhere in the Americas. Families change what a colony is. Single men on a gold expedition can leave. Households with children, tools and livestock intend to stay, and they need land, which has to come from somebody. Ovando's answer was policy. Rouse records that he set out to eliminate the independent caciques so the expanding settlements would be secure, and over the next two years he carried it through with a thoroughness that ended Taino political life on the island. This is the administration that fixed the shape of Spanish colonisation everywhere it went afterwards: a royal governor, a settler population holding land grants, a subject population assigned to work those grants, and the removal of any indigenous authority capable of saying no.

Anacaona ruled Xaragua in the southwest of Hispaniola, the country around what is now Leogane. She had been the wife of one cacique and the sister of another, and after both were destroyed she governed in her own name, known for the poetry and the ceremonial dances of her court. In 1503 Spanish soldiers came into her territory with an invitation to talk. She received them with a feast. They seized her, killed the chiefs who had come with her, and hanged her. Dubois offers the episode as the emblem of what happened to indigenous leadership under Spanish rule, and it earns the role. There was no battle. The Spanish worked the protocol of hospitality that Taino politics ran on, the same protocol Guacanagari had extended to Columbus eleven years earlier. Her name survives in Haiti as the memory of a sovereign the island lost.

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.