A Renaissance villa on the Ozama sets a pattern for the Caribbean

In 1510 a house was built on the bank of the Ozama river at Santo Domingo for Diego Colon, son of Christopher Columbus and governor of the Spanish Indies. It was an Italian Renaissance villa, and it is known as the Casa del Almirante, the admiral's house. Its three part symmetrical plan fixed the style and the proportions of smaller Spanish country houses across the island from the fifteen thirties onward. The first of those houses had open loggias without full galleries. Galleries began to be added around the end of the fifteen hundreds and grew steadily more popular through the following century. When French planters started building in the western part of the island a hundred and fifty years after that, they were working on ground where the Spanish pattern was long established. The plantation house of Saint-Domingue, one room deep with a broad gallery in front and small cabinet rooms behind, descends from a governor's villa on the Ozama.

The Africans landed on Hispaniola in 1510 opened a traffic that ran for three centuries. Something over half a million people were eventually carried to the western third of the island alone, the part that became the French colony of Saint-Domingue and then Haiti. They did not arrive as a people. They came from Kongo and Angola, from the Bight of Benin, from Senegambia, from the Bight of Biafra, speaking dozens of unrelated languages and holding different religions, laws and forms of rule. The plantation threw them together and gave them nothing. What they made out of that is the point. A new language, Haitian Creole, with a largely French vocabulary set on West African and Kongo grammar. A new religion, Vodou, which took the spirits of several nations and arranged them in one system. New obligations between people who were not kin. The nation founded in 1804 was assembled from those materials under conditions designed to stop anything being assembled at all.

Mocombe opens his historical chapter with Columbus claiming the island for Spain and the Spanish exploiting its gold mines with Taino labour. He puts the pre-contact Taino population at between three and four million and states that after fifty years of Spanish rule they had been destroyed by the hardship of enslavement, organised massacres and imported disease. He calls this one of the most brutal exterminations on record. The mechanism he then traces is the substitution that followed. A Spanish priest protested against the massacre of the indigenous population and demanded an end to the injustices against them, and advocated importing Africans to work the mines and plantations as a way of ending Indian slavery on the island. Mocombe treats the two populations as directly linked by that argument rather than as separate chapters. Where this account departs from the standard one: Mocombe adopts a pre-contact Taino population of three to four million, at the very top of a range where most current estimates for Hispaniola are far lower.

In 1510 the Spanish crown authorised the shipment of enslaved Africans to Hispaniola and the first of them came ashore. The reason was arithmetic. Colonists had been extracting gold and food from the island using Taino labour under the encomienda system, and the Taino were dying, from overwork, from hunger when their fields went untended, and from smallpox and other diseases against which they had no immunity. The colony's output depended on bodies it no longer had. Africa offered a supply that could be bought and shipped, and Portugal already held the trading posts and the vessels. That decision stood for nearly three hundred years. It moved more than ten million people alive across the Atlantic, and it built the sugar economy that made the western third of this island the most valuable colony in the world. It also assembled, on the same ground, the population that abolished slavery there by force in 1793 and founded Haiti in 1804.