A French court rules that France holds no slaves

The Parlement of Guyenne, the sovereign court sitting at Bordeaux, declared that France, mother of liberty, permits no slaves. It was a statement about soil. Anyone standing on French ground was free by the fact of standing there, and the court said so in language grand enough to be quoted for the next two hundred years. Bordeaux is worth noticing. It became one of the great slaving ports of Europe, fitting out voyages to Africa and taking in the sugar of Saint-Domingue. The maxim survived all of that, because French law drew its line at the water. The principle governed the kingdom, and the colonies were held to be a separate legal world where the Code Noir applied instead. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of what it cost later. Free soil was real enough that enslaved people brought into France sued for their liberty and sometimes won them, and the state hearing those cases was at the same time building the largest slave colony on earth.

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.

In 1568 the Kongo was overrun by invaders the sources call the Jaga, and King Alvaro I asked for help. A small Portuguese force came in from Sao Tome and drove them out. Most of its members then stayed. With their firearms, their range of trades and their children of mixed parentage they formed a distinct class inside the kingdom, though they were never admitted to the traditional ruling families or given chieftaincies. They were useful to the king for their languages and skills and generally loyal to him, and at the same time they were something no king could fully control, which Afonso had complained about half a century earlier. Their occupation was slave trading. They also supplied the church with much of its personnel, since a number of white and mixed race priests came out of this community, and they took up local remedies against witchcraft and sickness as readily as anyone else.

On the voyage he afterwards called unfortunate, John Hawkins joined a local king in an attack on a town in Guinea said to hold eight thousand people. His men went in with fire and weapons, overran the defenders, and took losses of their own, several killed and many wounded. The immediate haul was 250 prisoners. Overnight the allied king removed his own share, and Hawkins made up the number by other means, finishing with somewhere between 400 and 500 people in the hold. He then set course for the West Indies to sell them, along with the rest of his merchandise, and recover what the expedition had cost. Two things are worth keeping from this. An English gentleman sailing with royal favour was personally burning African towns in the 1560s. And he was doing it as the junior partner of a ruler who out manoeuvred him in the dark and kept the pick of the prisoners. The trade was never one side simply acting upon another.