The last free chiefdom on the island is destroyed by an invitation

By 1502, when Nicolas de Ovando arrived as governor, Xaragua was the only part of the island still outside Spanish control. Ovando sent word that he would pay a visit. Anacaona, who had ruled since her brother's death, called in everyone her kingdom could muster and prepared the ceremonial welcome for which she was famous. The Spanish turned the gathering into a killing. The massacre carried out by an officer named Alcantara spared neither women nor children nor the old, and the chiefdom was burned. Anacaona herself was taken by trickery, put in chains, subjected to every kind of humiliation and dragged to Santo Domingo, where she was tried for conspiracy, condemned and hanged in 1503. Her daughter Higuenamota lived a little longer. A Spanish officer named Fernando de Guevara paid with his life for loving her. Contemporaries who wrote about Anacaona, among them Las Casas and Oviedo, called her a very noble person and a great lady.

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.

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.