One label covered dozens of nations in the Kongo and Angola trade

West Central Africa sent more captives into the Atlantic than any other region, and its politics were far more elaborate than the shorthand used in the Americas suggests. The Kingdom of Kongo was a Christian state with provinces, a court and an ambassador in Rome. The Lunda Confederation controlled trade routes deep in the interior. The Ovimbundu kingdoms of the highlands traded and raided in every direction. From 1526 to 1867 people taken from all of these were sold to Portuguese buyers by war leaders working the routes inland from Luanda and Benguela, and once they were landed on the far side of the ocean the paperwork called them Congos. That single word covers languages, laws and religions with nothing to do with one another. It matters for Haiti. Kongo people were a large share of the arrivals in Saint-Domingue in the last decades before 1791, and the Petwo rite in Vodou carries a great deal of that inheritance.

A colonial census taken in Santo Domingo in 1606 listed 9,696 enslaved people in a total population of perhaps sixteen thousand. Of those, only 800 were employed in sugar. Forty years earlier the same colony had held about twenty thousand captives and had shipped sugar in quantity. Three things ended that. Spain restricted where and with whom its colonists could trade. The empire turned its attention and its best administrators toward New Spain and Peru, which had silver and large settled indigenous populations. Brazilian sugar undercut the Dominican product in Europe. What replaced the mills was cattle ranching, tobacco and small plots farmed by peasants, many of them freed people or their children, often far from any official who might interfere. Church and state in Santo Domingo became among the weakest in Spanish America. That weakness frustrated the local elite and left room for everyone the sugar regime had ground down.

About 1670 buccaneers crossed from the island of Tortuga and founded the settlement on the northern coast of Hispaniola that became Cap Francois and is now Cap-Haitien. They had been trading with the Spanish towns of the north since the middle of the previous century. The houses they put up were rectangular and built by a method the French called the Indian style: forked posts driven straight into the earth, carrying the plates and the ridge, with walls of wattle or of split palm bark and roofs of thatch. Almost everything in the town was made of plant material. When Pere Labat passed through in 1701 he found a place laid out on a rectangular grid holding about three hundred houses. The city that a century later would be the richest in the Caribbean, with its theatre, its printing presses and its learned societies, began as a row of earthfast huts thrown up by men who lived off raiding.

Faustin Soulouque, head of the Haitian state and a committed servant of the spirits, made himself emperor in 1850 and ruled without mercy. The European newspapers had been waiting for a figure like him. They called him the sum of every recollection of aboriginal savagery and announced that he had set Haiti on a course of complete regression to African barbarism. Honore Daumier produced a caricature the same year showing the emperor in his regalia about to drop a journalist who had criticised Haitian politics into a pot of boiling water. Racist theory was gaining ground across Europe in these decades and it found in Haitian religion an inexhaustible supply of material. Soulouque fell in 1860. What is worth noticing is how little the coverage had to do with him. The caricature was about the existence of a black state, and the emperor merely gave it a face.