A French traveller files Brazil under the carnival Europe was banning

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.

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 the 1560s the sugar plantation was transplanted successfully into northeastern Brazil. It is a small sentence with a very large consequence. For the following hundred years the majority of everyone carried across the Atlantic in chains was landed in that one colony. Sugar is what made the difference. It is a crop that has to be cut, milled and boiled within hours, it exhausts soil, and it exhausts the people who work it, so it consumes labour at a rate no other export crop of the period approached. Once the technique was running in Brazil, the volume of the slave trade stopped being set by what Africa would sell and started being set by what America would buy. Every later sugar frontier, Barbados, Jamaica and above all Saint-Domingue, ran the same equation and got the same answer. I put the 1560s on a Haitian timeline because the machine that would consume Saint-Domingue was assembled in Pernambuco first, and it was already working before a single French settler reached Tortuga.