Britain's slave trade peaks three years before it is abolished

The Dutch dominated the northern half of the Atlantic slave trade until the end of the seventeenth century, and after that Britain did. British ships delivered captives to a wider spread of American territories than the vessels of any other nation, which is why British slaving turns up in the records of colonies Britain did not own. The business was run out of three cities. London, Bristol and Liverpool between them owned or fitted almost every voyage, with Liverpool eventually taking the largest share. The peak fell between 1799 and 1802, and that date is worth holding on to. The traffic was moving more people in those years than at any earlier point, and five years later Parliament passed the abolition act of 1807 and the British trade stopped. Abolition did not arrive as the natural end of a fading business. It was imposed on an industry at the top of its form by the same state that had spent a century and a half protecting it.

Francois Makandal, a Muslim from Guinea, became the best known of the maroon leaders in 1757. He prophesied that the white masters would be wiped out. He spread terror among them by preparing poisons that killed slowly, and he supplied rebellious slaves with talismans called garde-corps, which were held to make the wearer invulnerable to weapons and to remove all fear of white people. Several groups of maroons were said to be under his command. His name outlived him in the language of the colony. Makandal became the general word in Saint-Domingue for a talisman or a poison, and later for the ceremonies in which such charms were made. That linguistic afterlife is the measure of what he achieved. A man who has been executed can still be a working category in the vocabulary of the people who executed him, and every planter who used the word was repeating his name without meaning to.

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.

Jean de Lery published the story of a voyage made to the land of Brazil in 1578, and in describing what he had seen he reached for a European template. A gathering of Indian women became a sabbath, imagined on the model of the carnival that was then being pushed out of European towns by the rising bourgeois communes, exiled into the countryside, the forests and the night. The machinery Europe had built to identify witches and heretics at home travelled across the Atlantic and was pointed at people it had never been designed for. This begins a habit that lasted centuries in the Caribbean. African and American religious practice was slotted into a demonology already written, in which the drum, the dance and the offering carried a meaning fixed in advance by the observer. Haiti inherited that reading, and it is still the frame in which Vodou is discussed abroad.