Regular slaving to Brazil begins and never really stops

Systematic shipping of African captives to Brazil began around 1560, when Portuguese planters in Pernambuco and Bahia had sugar mills running and needed a workforce larger than indigenous labour and warfare could provide. The traffic continued until 1850. About forty-four percent of everyone forced across the Atlantic ended in Brazil, more than all the Caribbean islands together and more than twelve times the number landed in mainland North America. It was also organised differently. Ships were fitted out in Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro instead of Lisbon, financed by Brazilian merchants, and paid for in Brazilian goods, tobacco and sugar brandy that African buyers wanted. A direct commercial relationship ran across the South Atlantic between Brazil and Angola for three centuries with Europe barely involved. That is why the African inheritance in Bahia can be traced to particular regions with unusual precision, and why Candomble and Haitian Vodou share structures without either having borrowed from the other.

By the late 1560s Spanish Santo Domingo held roughly twenty thousand enslaved people, about six thousand Spanish colonists and some five hundred surviving indigenous inhabitants. The captives worked the sugar mills, other farms and the households of the town. This lopsided ratio of enslaved to free was the first of its kind in the tropical Americas, and every later plantation colony in the Caribbean reproduced it. The colony had become a serious sugar exporter by the middle of the century, with output put by some accounts at several thousand tons a year. The wealth rested on a machinery of coercion that was still new in the hemisphere and that would be copied for the next three hundred years. It did not last long here. Within a generation the Dominican sugar economy was finished, undone by Spanish trade restrictions, by the pull of silver in Mexico and Peru, and by cheaper Brazilian sugar reaching the same European buyers.

Maize most probably crossed the Atlantic on one of Columbus's return voyages in the 1490s. By the 1560s it was being grown on the west coast of Africa and in the Hunan province of China, places far from the Americas and far from one another. In those same years Spanish friars set up the first wineries of Chile, Peru and California, and people in Mexico who had never seen cattle before the conquest were working ranches that ran to 150,000 head. Communities on the Angola and Congo coastline took up maize in the late sixteenth century faster than espresso moved inland from the two coasts of the United States four hundred years later. There was nothing mysterious in that speed. The grain accounting of that stretch of coast, down to the calories one person needed in a day, made maize the practical crop, so people planted it. Crops, animals and diseases had been crossing oceans for a century before anyone called the traffic new.

In 1556 Henry the Second of France issued an edict enfranchising the remaining serfs of the Dauphine, the province in the southeast around Grenoble. Serfdom was already residual in France and the measure was largely administrative. Lawyers made more of it later. It became one of the texts cited in support of what French jurists called the freedom principle, the doctrine that the soil of France made free anyone standing on it, so that an enslaved person brought to a French port could sue for liberty and expect to win. That doctrine collided with the colonies. Saint-Domingue produced the wealth keeping the French treasury solvent and it produced it with slave labour, so French law had to hold two positions at once: no slavery in France, slavery everywhere France profited. The edict of 1716 and the declaration of 1738 were attempts to manage the contradiction by regulating masters who brought slaves to Paris. In 1791 it was settled from the other end.