Six Nubians walk to Ethiopia to ask for priests and are turned away

Francisco Alvares, a Portuguese priest who spent six years in Ethiopia in the 1520s, wrote down two reports about the country to the west. A travelling Syrian named John told him he had found about a hundred and fifty churches in Nubia still holding crucifixes and paintings of the Virgin, whose people were now neither Christian, Muslim nor Jewish and who said they wished to be Christians. Then, while Alvares was still in the country, six Nubians arrived at the Ethiopian court. They had come to ask the Emperor Lebna Dengel to send them priests and monks. He refused, explaining that his own metropolitan came to him from Alexandria and that he could not give away what another gave him. They went home. This was roughly forty years after the last recorded Nubian bishop, which is about the length of time the last priests he ordained would have lived.

The first armed conspiracy of enslaved people recorded anywhere in the Americas took place on Hispaniola in 1522, while the island was still under Spanish rule alone. About twenty men, many of them Wolof from Senegambia, rose on a sugar estate belonging to Diego Columbus, killed several Spaniards and set out to gather other captives from neighbouring estates. Mounted colonists ran them down within days and executed the survivors, hanging bodies along the roads. The authorities then restricted the import of Wolof captives, on the theory that people from a Muslim region with a tradition of military organisation were too dangerous to buy. Every slaveholding power in the hemisphere would repeat that reasoning for three centuries, and it never worked. What the episode establishes is timing. Armed resistance appears twelve years after the first Africans were landed on the island. It was there from the beginning, and it did not stop until 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.

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.