England's wealth multiplies by five in a hundred and fifty years

A memoir on commerce, reprinted for readers in Saint-Domingue in January 1767, laid out England's national wealth as a running total. In 1600 everything the country held in money, ships, houses and land was valued at 216 million pounds sterling. By 1660 the figure had more than doubled. By 1688 it had nearly tripled. By 1749 it stood at a thousand million pounds, roughly five times where it started. The dates are not neutral. The interval from 1600 to 1749 is precisely the period in which England took Barbados and Jamaica, built its sugar colonies, chartered the Royal African Company and became the largest carrier of captive Africans in the Atlantic. The accounting of the day entered no line for enslaved people, and it counted the ships that carried them and the houses their sugar paid for. Planters in Saint-Domingue read these numbers as a competitor's balance sheet. Their own colony was climbing the same curve and would soon out produce every British island.

On 30 October 1665 the army of the Kongo met the Portuguese forces of Loanda at Ambuila and was destroyed. The king, Antonio I, died there, along with his son, the dukes of Mbamba, Mbata, Nsundi and Gorimba, the marquess of Mpemba, and ninety five title holders altogether, as well as a Capuchin who had come against his prefect's orders. Antonio had brought his crown, his sceptre and the royal archives with him. Everything was lost. Angola's expansion had made a strong independent kingdom to its north unacceptable, and Angola's economy was the traffic in slaves feeding Brazil. The kingdom that had existed since Afonso I, and the Christian ruling class that had formed inside it, never recovered. Succession disputes multiplied between rival clans, and in 1678 one of the contending armies sacked Mbanza Kongo itself. The churches and palace were left in ruins and nobody lived in the city for twenty five years.

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.

Guaman Poma de Ayala was a Quechua living in Tawantinsuyu while the territory of the Inca was being replaced by the Viceroyalty of Peru. His Nueva coronica y buen gobierno, of 1616, addressed Philip the Third of Spain directly, and its last forty or so drawings are given over to labour in Tawantinsuyu, a conception of work that had nothing to do with the European medieval idea of labour and was being displaced by it. He wrote from inside the world under discussion. The Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria, arguing at the same period about the rights of the Indians, wrote from Salamanca about people he had never met, and de Vitoria has been praised, criticised and enthroned as a founder of international law ever since. Guaman Poma was ignored until recently, and his book is still treated as a document rather than as a political treatise. Both men wrote about the same conquest.