Luanda ships more people than any other place in Africa

The Portuguese founded Luanda on the Angolan coast in 1575. After 1620 it embarked more captive Africans than anywhere else in sub Saharan Africa, and it held that position for the better part of three hundred years. Almost nothing about the operation changed. Portuguese ships had the port largely to themselves, and Brazilian ships took over from them, so the same two flags handled the traffic from beginning to end while the rest of the African coast changed hands repeatedly. The supply came from far inland. The Lunda empire, built by Bantu speaking rulers east of the coast, roughly doubled its territory through conquest, and the wars that achieved that sent prisoners toward the sea in a steady flow. Command of the business moved even while the port stayed the same. Lisbon merchants ran it at first, and direction passed to Recife, Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, so a Portuguese fort in Africa ended up working chiefly for buyers in South America.

In 1605 and 1606 the colonial authorities in Santo Domingo destroyed the settlements along the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola. The aim was to stop the contraband trade that those towns carried on with foreign shipping. The result was a further fall in a population that was already shrinking, since many Spaniards on the island left for the American mainland, drawn by stories of rich indigenous kingdoms and by a crown that now cared more about its continental colonies. New settlers from Spain saw no reason to come to the Caribbean. The nineteenth century Dominican historian Jose Gabriel Garcia, a doctrinaire liberal, called the operation a violent answer to a problem the government could not win by law, and held that a freer trade policy would have prevented it. He also drew the longer line. Emptying the north and west of the island opened the door for French colonists to settle there.

When the Compagnie Francaise des Iles d'Amerique was set up in 1635 to carry on the traffic in enslaved Africans, Louis XIII laid down that everyone the company took had to be baptised and instructed in the Catholic faith. Conversion was the stated purpose of the commerce, and one of the earliest missionaries in the French islands, Father Jean-Baptiste Dutertre, wrote plainly that saving the souls of black people was the reason the business existed. In practice the rule produced an effect nobody in Paris had planned. Enslaved people treated baptism as a source of power rather than a change of allegiance, and presented themselves for it three, four, five and six times over. Planters grew suspicious of the priests, whom they thought capable of preaching that black and white were equal before God, and did what they could to keep religious instruction away from the work gangs.

In 1848 the budget of the Haitian army stood at 3,232,225 francs, which came to sixty five per cent of everything the national government spent. Faustin Soulouque was in his second year as president and would crown himself emperor the following year. The figure is worth setting beside what the state did not do. It ran almost no schools outside the towns, maintained few roads, and drew most of its revenue from a tax on coffee grown by farmers it otherwise left alone. No European power was preparing to land. France had recognised Haitian independence in 1825 and the threat that justified this spending had passed a generation earlier. The army existed at that size because control of it was the route to the presidency, and every president had to pay for the loyalty that had put him there and could remove him. Two thirds of public money went to the one institution that decided who governed.