Fick puts the survivors at one hundred thousand from roughly a million

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.

African captives may have reached the Americas as early as 1498, on Columbus's third voyage. For the first quarter century the traffic ran through Europe. Enslaved Africans were held in Seville and Lisbon and then shipped west with other cargo, which meant the earliest Black people in the Spanish Caribbean had already spent years on the Iberian peninsula and often spoke Spanish or Portuguese. Sailings direct from the African coast to the Americas became the normal arrangement around 1525, and that shift created the trade as it is usually pictured. Eltis and Richardson count roughly 10.7 million captives landed across the three and a half centuries that followed. Set beside the European migration of the same period, the figure reverses the ordinary picture of who peopled the hemisphere. Until the great European movements of the nineteenth century the Americas were, in demographic terms, an extension of Africa, and Saint-Domingue was among the most African places on earth.

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.

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.