Puerto Rico's captives arrived mostly from other Caribbean ports

The traffic in enslaved Africans to Puerto Rico ran from 1527 to 1842 and stayed small beside Cuba or Saint-Domingue. Spanish and Portuguese ships handled the early arrivals; French and British merchants dominated later. West Central Africa was the main source throughout, with substantial numbers from Upper Guinea and the Bight of Biafra. The distinctive feature is the route. Most people did not reach Puerto Rican shores straight from Africa. They were landed first at Saint Thomas, at Havana or at other re-export centres, then sold onward in small lots, because the island was too thin a market to justify sending a full slaver to it directly. Scale shaped the society that resulted. Puerto Rico never developed the overwhelming enslaved majority that made Saint-Domingue what it was, free people of colour formed a large part of the population early, and the island entered the nineteenth century with a mixed rural peasantry alongside its plantations.

At the end of the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue held between 400,000 and 500,000 enslaved people, about 40,000 whites, and some 25,000 free black people and people of mixed descent. In 1789 the colony had 793 sugar plantations. It accounted for more than a third of all French trade outside France, which made it the richest possession the country had, and every year five hundred ships unloaded its sugar, coffee, indigo, copper and timber in French ports. The whites who lived there, whether petty clerks or great planters, were occupied with dinners, balls, taverns and theatres, and with quarrels over the mistresses of estate managers. They resented the rule that colonial produce could be sold only to France and only at prices France set. Visitors were already describing the place as a volcano under the feet of the dancers, and the arithmetic at the head of this entry explains why.

In March 1529 Ahmed Gran, who led the armies of the Muslim sultanate of Adal, destroyed the Ethiopian army at Chembra Koure. He then worked through the country year by year, starting in the east and moving north and west, targeting churches and monasteries. Dabra Libanos went up in flames on 14 July 1532 and a number of its monks threw themselves into the fire. The cathedral of St Mary of Zion at Aksum, which probably dated from the sixth century, was reduced to rubble. Early in 1540 the royal fortress of Amba Geshen fell with the treasury and the state archives inside it. Tens of thousands of people accepted Islam and many more were marched off into slavery. Almost no Ethiopian manuscript survives from before 1530. By 1540 Gran considered himself king of the country and much of the population obeyed him. His soldiers had brought their wives from Adal and settled.

In 1605 and 1606 the colonial authorities in Santo Domingo destroyed the settlements along the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola. The aim was to stop the contraband trade that those towns carried on with foreign shipping. The result was a further fall in a population that was already shrinking, since many Spaniards on the island left for the American mainland, drawn by stories of rich indigenous kingdoms and by a crown that now cared more about its continental colonies. New settlers from Spain saw no reason to come to the Caribbean. The nineteenth century Dominican historian Jose Gabriel Garcia, a doctrinaire liberal, called the operation a violent answer to a problem the government could not win by law, and held that a freer trade policy would have prevented it. He also drew the longer line. Emptying the north and west of the island opened the door for French colonists to settle there.