Egypt spends three centuries as an Ottoman province in name only

The Ottoman army destroyed the Mameluke sultanate in 1517 and Egypt became a province governed from Istanbul. The Ottomans used it as a base to push south into Nubia and out into the Red Sea, taking the port of Massawa on the Eritrean coast, largely in answer to Portuguese warships that had entered the Indian Ocean and were interfering with Muslim trade. Control loosened over time. The Mameluke military aristocracy recovered its position through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its leading households taking the title of bey, while the viceroys sent out from Istanbul founded local dynasties of their own. By the late eighteenth century Cairo answered to the sultan on paper and to nobody in practice. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded in 1798 and was forced out in 1801 by an Ottoman and British alliance. That episode opened the contest between Britain and France over Egypt which shaped the country for the rest of the nineteenth century.

Francois Makandal, a Muslim from Guinea, became the best known of the maroon leaders in 1757. He prophesied that the white masters would be wiped out. He spread terror among them by preparing poisons that killed slowly, and he supplied rebellious slaves with talismans called garde-corps, which were held to make the wearer invulnerable to weapons and to remove all fear of white people. Several groups of maroons were said to be under his command. His name outlived him in the language of the colony. Makandal became the general word in Saint-Domingue for a talisman or a poison, and later for the ceremonies in which such charms were made. That linguistic afterlife is the measure of what he achieved. A man who has been executed can still be a working category in the vocabulary of the people who executed him, and every planter who used the word was repeating his name without meaning to.

Fourteen years after the first cargo, the Spanish crown put the arrangement on a formal footing. Charles V authorised the importation of fifteen thousand enslaved black people into the Spanish Caribbean. The number matters less than the act. Until then Africans had been landed on Hispaniola in small consignments as the gold workings ran short of hands. A licence for fifteen thousand converted an improvisation into a policy, and gave merchants a guaranteed market to organise around. The Gulf of Guinea coast, where the ships loaded, was already selling captives to Portuguese buyers for the sugar estates of the Canary Islands. What the licence did was point that trade west across the Atlantic and fix its destination. Every later structure of the Caribbean, the plantation, the slave code, the mixed African populations of the islands, rests on decisions of this kind taken in Europe in the first decades of the century.

Carolyn Fick opens her history of the Haitian Revolution with a number. The indigenous people of the island, whom she names as Arawak, had fallen to about one hundred thousand by 1519, from a figure she puts near one million when the Spanish arrived in 1492. Other historians count differently. Some put the 1492 population at three hundred thousand, others far higher, and the disagreement turns on how much land the islanders farmed and what that land could feed. The scale of the fall holds in every version. Twenty-seven years covers it, less than the working life of one Spanish official. The reason a figure like this belongs at the front of a book about 1791 is that it establishes what the colony was built on. The people who met the first ships were gone, and the labour force that produced French wealth on that ground had to be brought from another continent.