Bahia trades tobacco for people on a route of its own

Salvador da Bahia took in close to 1.4 million captive Africans, which places it among the largest slaving ports that have ever existed. Its supply line was unusual. The rest of Brazil bought in West Central Africa; Bahia dealt with the Bight of Benin, thousands of kilometres up the coast. The reason was what Bahia had to offer in exchange. Tobacco grown behind the city was cured and twisted into rolls that buyers at Ouidah preferred to anything shipped from Europe, and Bahian sugar travelled with it. Local merchants financed and fitted out their own vessels, and the currents of the South Atlantic let those vessels reach Africa and return without a European partner, a European port or a European licence. The demographic result was specific rather than general. The people brought into Bahia were largely Ewe and Yoruba speakers, arriving in numbers large enough to keep their languages and their forms of worship whole, and the city has been built on that inheritance ever since.

The ship Santiago left Sierra Leone for Puerto Rico in 1566 carrying captives who were probably taken during the Mane invasions from the east. It stopped at the Los Islands off Conakry for fresh water. People on the island, themselves refugees from those same wars, attacked the ship and killed a crewman. The Santiago sailed on. Ninety two people came ashore in Puerto Rico and fifteen of them were male. Mortality on comparable ships in the early 1560s ran between ten and forty per cent, so more had been loaded than were landed. That same year almost half of the two hundred and sixty eight captives on another ship out of Sierra Leone died before it reached Cartagena. Women made up majorities on many sixteenth and seventeenth century crossings. The image of the slave ship as a hold full of men belongs to later centuries and to the historians who did the counting.

France declared sovereignty over western Hispaniola in 1664. The declaration covered a place French settlers and buccaneers had already been living in for decades, so the novelty lay in the claim rather than in the occupation. Spain rejected it. Madrid had held the island since Columbus and regarded every French farm on it as a trespass, and thirty three years passed before Spanish recognition came in a European peace treaty. Through those years the French planted, imported captives, and fought. The ground in question is the western third of the island, and it became Saint-Domingue. By the 1780s that strip of land was producing more wealth than any comparable territory on earth, more sugar and coffee than all the British West Indies together, and every unit of it was produced by people carried across the Atlantic in chains. A claim made on paper in 1664 is the legal ancestor of that arrangement.

In 1848 the budget of the Haitian army stood at 3,232,225 francs, which came to sixty five per cent of everything the national government spent. Faustin Soulouque was in his second year as president and would crown himself emperor the following year. The figure is worth setting beside what the state did not do. It ran almost no schools outside the towns, maintained few roads, and drew most of its revenue from a tax on coffee grown by farmers it otherwise left alone. No European power was preparing to land. France had recognised Haitian independence in 1825 and the threat that justified this spending had passed a generation earlier. The army existed at that size because control of it was the route to the presidency, and every president had to pay for the loyalty that had put him there and could remove him. Two thirds of public money went to the one institution that decided who governed.