The first asiento licenses shipping captives straight from Africa

Until 1518 enslaved Africans reaching Spanish America generally came by way of Spain, landed first in Iberian ports and re-shipped from there, which was slow and expensive and kept the numbers small. In that year the Spanish crown issued the first asiento, a contract granting its holder the right to deliver a fixed number of captives from the African coast to the Caribbean without an intervening European stop. Spain held no trading posts in Africa, having conceded that coast to Portugal by treaty, so the asiento was always a licence sold to foreigners. Portuguese, then Dutch, then French and finally British contractors held it in turn, and possession of it became a prize in European wars; Britain took the asiento from Spain at Utrecht in 1713. The instrument matters because it turned the traffic into routine business with quotas, prices, insurers and standing in law, which is the condition under which a trade grows large.

Africans were on the island from about 1500. King Ferdinand sent the first official consignment in 1510, to work the mines and the sugar. Bishop Las Casas argued for the substitution in the hope of sparing the indigenous population, and lived long enough to regret having said it. The Heinls call the result a hecatomb. The system Las Casas helped licence ran for three centuries and consumed millions of lives. Two dates inside this span matter more than the rest. By 1503 enslaved Africans were already going into the mountains and building free settlements there, which makes marronage on this island older than its sugar industry and almost as old as slavery itself. In 1518 Charles the Fifth issued a formal slaving monopoly with an annual ceiling of four thousand captives, many of them taken from the coasts of Dahomey and Guinea. Those coasts became the ancestral ground of the people who took the colony back in 1804.

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.

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.