Las Casas asks Spain to import Africans to spare the Indians

On 18 August 1517 the Spanish government licensed the import of enslaved Africans into Hispaniola in large numbers. Bartolome de las Casas had pressed for it. He had spent years fighting the encomienda system and the destruction of the Taino, and what he put to the court was a substitution: bring labour from Africa and the surviving indigenous people would be left alone. He came to regret it and wrote so, once he understood that he had helped fasten one people into slavery while trying to release another. Rayford Logan, writing in 1941, treats the licence as the point at which the history of this island parted from every other European holding in the region. The traffic it opened ran three hundred years and carried hundreds of thousands of people into the western third of Hispaniola, under conditions at sea that killed a large share of them. Men and women who rose in 1791 had made that crossing and remembered it.

By 1514 the seizure of Kongo people for sale to Portuguese buyers had become common enough in West Central Africa to threaten public order and the authority of the king. In 1526 Afonso, king of Kongo, wrote to Portugal to say that traders were everywhere in his country, that they were ruining it, and that people were being enslaved and kidnapped daily, nobles among them and relatives of his own. The letter is one of the earliest written protests against the Atlantic trade by a reigning head of state, and it came from a Christian monarch whose kingdom had received the Portuguese as guests a generation before. The breakdown of law and order it describes helped weaken and eventually bring down a state that had been among the strongest in the region. Many of the people taken through this traffic reached the Caribbean, and Kongo names, spirits and vocabulary are still present in Haiti.

Daut follows Vastey and Ardouin in treating the revolt of Enrique, known also as Enriquillo and rendered by Haitian writers as Henri, as the island's founding act of successful resistance. Raised in a convent and formed by admiration for Bartolome de las Casas, Enrique broke with the son of his late protector Valenzuela in 1519 and took to the mountains. He gathered weapons, then persuaded hundreds of Ayitians and dozens of enslaved Africans to follow him, and sustained a fourteen year war from a maroon state in the Bahoruco range in what is now the Dominican Republic. Ardouin's conclusion, which Daut foregrounds, is that the Indians and Africans of Ayiti set the honourable example that others later followed. Nineteenth-century Haitians saw no accident in the shared name of Enrique and their own King Henry, and used the resemblance to knit indigenous and African resistance into one lineage.

In 1516 the chronicler Peter Martyr described the peoples of the New World as white, setting them against black Ethiopians. The comparison did more than note complexion. It placed the two groups on a ladder, and the ladder held. When Francois Bernier made the first attempt at a formal classification of human races in 1684, he assimilated the peoples of the Americas to the white race, which his scheme treated as the normal one, and left Africans at the far end of it. By the late fifteen thirties Spanish law had declared the indigenous peoples of the Americas free in principle and vassals of the crown like Spaniards, if secondary ones, while Africans remained the only openly enslaved labour force in the Spanish empire. The legal difference and the classificatory difference held each other in place for the next three centuries. A theological scheme and a natural historical one arrived at the same ranking.