Upper Guinea sends a twelfth of the captives and two fifths of the revolts

Upper Guinea is the stretch of West African coast running from Senegambia down past Sierra Leone. It supplied roughly 12 percent of everyone embarked in the Atlantic slave trade, and it accounts for more than 40 percent of every shipboard rebellion in the record. West Central Africa, which supplied a far larger share of captives than any other region, produced proportionally far fewer risings. The gap is too wide to be an accident of what survived in the archives, and it has been argued over since it was first measured. Distance explains part of it, since ships on that coast worked close to shores their captives could recognise. The political condition of the region is likely the rest. Where people are enslaved through war, the hold fills with men who have fought alongside each other and know how to organise, and organisation is what a rising on a ship requires. The people in the hold were never interchangeable, and the men who bought and shipped them understood that well enough to price it.

In 1605 the Spanish authorities on Hispaniola ordered the settlers of the western part of the island to abandon their towns and move east, and burned what they left behind. The reason was contraband. The western settlements had been trading with French and English smugglers for a generation, and Madrid concluded that the cure was to remove the population doing it. The order worked as policy and failed as strategy. Trade with foreigners stopped in those places because the places had ceased to exist. What remained was several hundred kilometres of empty coastline, with harbours, fresh water, and cattle running wild across the abandoned country. French and English crews who had been raiding Spanish shipping now had a shore they could use without opposition, and within twenty years they were living on it. The line Spain drew in 1605 by pulling its own people eastward runs close to the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic today. It began as an anti smuggling measure.

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.

Faustin Soulouque, head of the Haitian state and a committed servant of the spirits, made himself emperor in 1850 and ruled without mercy. The European newspapers had been waiting for a figure like him. They called him the sum of every recollection of aboriginal savagery and announced that he had set Haiti on a course of complete regression to African barbarism. Honore Daumier produced a caricature the same year showing the emperor in his regalia about to drop a journalist who had criticised Haitian politics into a pot of boiling water. Racist theory was gaining ground across Europe in these decades and it found in Haitian religion an inexhaustible supply of material. Soulouque fell in 1860. What is worth noticing is how little the coverage had to do with him. The caricature was about the existence of a black state, and the emperor merely gave it a face.