A governor arrives and colonisation becomes an office with files

Ovando came to Hispaniola in 1502 with two thousand five hundred settlers and the authority to govern them. Girard's emphasis falls on the bureaucracy. Until then the island had been run by an explorer holding a royal contract and a family interest, and it had produced revolt among the Spaniards and chaos among the Taino. Ovando installed the apparatus of a state, with towns laid out on a plan, land granted by written title, tribute assessed, and the labour of indigenous people allocated to settlers through the encomienda. Once extraction is administered rather than improvised it becomes efficient and continuous, and that is the change worth marking. The systems he built were exported to Cuba, to Mexico and to Peru, and the same logic reappeared two centuries later when France organised Saint-Domingue as a plantation colony with registers, quotas and a code. Colonial violence at scale requires paperwork. This is where the paperwork starts.

An estimated forty per cent of all the people carried across the Atlantic as slaves came from the Kongo and Angola region, a share far out of proportion to how many people lived there. One reason is that this was the only stretch of the coast where Europeans went inland themselves to seize captives directly instead of buying them from African traders at the shore. That method killed many more people in the taking, though by the height of the trade in the eighteenth century African entrepreneurs were running the inland end of it. The large functioning states that existed on this coast in the early sixteenth century were replaced by smaller and more frightened ones, and the region went backwards socially and politically for centuries. Europeans liked to describe Africans as cannibals. Africans watching neighbours carried off by the tens of thousands to an unexplained destination came to say the same thing about Europeans.

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.

Spanish vessels began the traffic in African people to the Americas in 1501, selling their captives in the Greater Antilles. Those put ashore had already been enslaved on the Iberian peninsula, where a domestic slave population had existed for generations through Portuguese voyages down the African coast after 1441. What happened in 1501 was the extension of a working European institution across an ocean. That matters for how the Atlantic system should be understood. Slavery in the Americas arrived with precedents, contracts, a body of law and merchants who already knew how to value a human being. The scale changed beyond recognition once sugar took hold, and the racial doctrine hardened over the following century into something the medieval Mediterranean would not have recognised. The machinery, though, sailed west in the first years of the sixteenth century, fully assembled, and it came ashore on this island first.