Sugar moves west across the Atlantic and slavery follows it

Sugar cane was first grown by slaves on Mediterranean islands, then on the Atlantic islands off Africa, then in Brazil and the Caribbean. Slavery travelled with it, because cane takes many hands and almost no skill, so the cost of supervising the work stays low while the quantity produced stays large. What altered as the crop crossed the ocean was who was enslaved. The islands that had grown cane first were ruined by it, their soils stripped and their populations gone, among them the Guanches of the Canaries. The indigenous people of the Caribbean islands disappeared altogether. On the mainland territory Spain called New Spain the population fell from roughly eleven million in 1519 to about one and a half million by around 1650, and Brazil and Peru fell as steeply. Europe then needed a large population close enough to reach and far enough outside its own economy that the cost of emptying it would not be felt at home. Western Africa answered that description.

Kongo kings had been trying for a century to open a direct line to Rome that Portugal could not cut. In 1604 Alvaro II sent Antonio Nsaku ne Vunda, the Mani Vunda, holder of the oldest religious office in the kingdom and the authority that sanctioned the king's own. He was held up for years in Spain. He landed at Civita Vecchia mortally ill, attended by a few servants and a Spanish Carmelite who had visited the Kongo as a young man, and reached Rome on 5 January 1608, the eve of Epiphany, the feast that celebrates the kings of the world coming to Christ with gifts. Pope Paul V came to his room. The ambassador commended the king and church of the Kongo to him and died. The scene was painted into the frescoes of the Vatican Library and his bust stands in Santa Maria Maggiore.

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.

The Lisbon Inquisition set up its commissioner's office in Salvador in 1549. Every case from the Portuguese empire was handled from the metropole, unlike the Spanish system with its regional tribunals at Lima and Cartagena. Anyone wishing to denounce a neighbour went to the commissioner, who investigated and sent his findings across the Atlantic. If Lisbon declined to prosecute, and it usually did, the report was copied into the prosecutor's notebooks, a standing record of the cases that went nowhere. The inquisitors cared about judaizing and heresy. Of the 143 Bahian cases that reached full trial between 1593 and 1687, not one concerned sorcery or anything close to it, and only two involved people of African descent at all. Denunciations of African healers existed in the notebooks well before that date. The gap between what colonists reported and what Lisbon would try is why the archive has the shape it has.