Brazil takes more than two and a half million people by 1790

By the close of the sixteenth century Brazil was the leading sugar producer in the world, and its three great ports were the busiest arrival points for Africans anywhere in the Americas. Recife, Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro received ships direct from the African coast. They also worked as transfer stations. Gold and diamonds were found in the interior in the eighteenth century, and people landed on the coast were marched inland to the mining districts of Minas Gerais and Goias. After 1760 the northern ports of Para and Maranhao began drawing slavers of their own, because the mills of Europe wanted cotton and the Amazon fringe could grow it. Add the columns and more than 2.5 million people had been landed in Brazil before the nineteenth century began. That is well beyond anything Saint-Domingue absorbed across its entire existence, and Brazil was nowhere near finished. The largest destination of the Atlantic slave trade is the one that gets the least attention in accounts written in English.

In March 1685 the French crown issued the edict known as the Code Noir. Its sixty articles set out how enslaved people in the French colonies were to be held, fed, clothed, punished, married, baptised and buried. It required conversion to Catholicism and expelled Jews from the colonies. It defined the enslaved as movable property while also treating them as persons capable of crime and of religious duty, a contradiction the colonial courts spent a century managing. It fixed that a child followed the condition of its mother, which made every child born to an enslaved woman the property of her owner and made rape profitable. It placed some limits on masters, requiring rations and clothing and forbidding certain killings, and enforcement of those limits was rare. The edict framed French colonial slavery until 1848. Saint-Domingue was the colony where it governed the most people, and the people it governed there ended it themselves in 1793.

Louis XIV of France and William III of England closed their war in 1697 by exchanging territory neither of them had ever seen. The Treaty of Ryswick was a general settlement covering Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and among its terms Spain gave up the western third of Hispaniola to France. Spain had held nominal title to the whole island for two centuries and had governed the western end of it hardly at all, its own settlers having withdrawn eastward long before. France received the piece that turned out to matter. Over the following century Saint-Domingue produced revenue on a scale that is hard to state without sounding careless. By the 1780s the colony was worth more to France, in trade and customs receipts, than the thirteen British colonies of North America were worth to Britain. One third of one Caribbean island out-earned the eastern seaboard of a continent. That is the wealth the enslaved population created, and it is the wealth they carried out of the empire with them.

The Jesuit Jose de Acosta published his Historia natural y moral de las Indias in 1590. In Christian European cosmology nature was something to be known, and understanding it meant understanding its creator. The Aymara and the Quechua had no metaphysics of that shape and no concept comparable to the European one, since they did not place human beings outside the world they lived in. Acosta was therefore describing a nature that existed in his own categories and not in theirs. The habit of treating human beings as separate from and above the rest of creation was carried to the Americas as part of the equipment of conquest, and it survives in the scholarship that grew from books like his. Anyone reading Vodou or Andean practice through that separation will find superstition where the practitioners find an ordinary account of how the world is arranged.