Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac were intact when the Spaniards arrived

Around 1500 the world was polycentric and not yet capitalist. Several civilisations coexisted, some ancient and some newly formed. In China the Ming had ruled since 1368 and would rule until 1644. Three sultanates had emerged out of the Islamic caliphates, the Ottoman with its centre at Constantinople, the Safavid at Baku, and the Mughal, which ran from 1526 to 1707. In 1520 the Muscovites expelled the Golden Horde and declared Moscow the third Rome. In the Americas the Inca in Tawantinsuyu and the Aztecs in Anahuac were both sophisticated civilisations at the moment the Spaniards landed. No single centre imposed itself on all the others, and conflicts stayed local because there was no reference point against which alternatives had to be measured. Within a century Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac had been dismantled, the Maya were already in decline, and the Atlantic had become the axis around which the rest of the planet was arranged.

In 1503, and possibly a few years before that, ships carrying enslaved Africans reached Hispaniola. They were the first to arrive anywhere in the Americas. Columbus had landed on the island in 1492 and set up a short lived regime that put the Taino people to work pulling gold out of the rivers. The gold gave out. Fighting, overwork and imported sickness killed almost the entire indigenous population inside about fifty years, and neither the removal of Columbus from command nor a series of royal orders issued by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile slowed the dying. Officials and settlers now wanted two things, a workforce and a crop that paid. They found the crop in the sugar estates of the Canary Islands, which had already shown how cane fields, a mill and captive labour could be assembled anywhere warm enough. The two answers arrived together, and Hispaniola became the ground on which the Atlantic plantation was first built.

In sixteenth century northern Senegambia the Portuguese slave trade was a leading cause of the disintegration of the Joloff confederation. Five much smaller kingdoms took its place, Waalo, Kajoor, Baol, Siin and Saalum. The same pattern appears further south. In southern Senegambia complex state systems had been forming before the trade arrived, and that development stalled soon after the Portuguese reached the coast in the fifteenth century. The areas that supplied the most captives tended to be the more developed ones, since they held the states, the routes and the market institutions that made capture and transport at scale possible. Where those states came apart, small bands of raiders under an established ruler or a warlord took over, and few band leaders could hand power to a successor. Leadership stayed a personal role instead of settling into an office, which is why the replacements never grew into stable states.

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.