A city whose main religious duty was baptising people before they were shipped

Loanda was a city of some size whose only real function was to serve as the principal port for shipping enslaved people across the Atlantic, and the chief public duty of its church was to make sure they were baptised before they boarded. From the middle of the seventeenth century the Portuguese empire in Africa had changed purpose. It had begun as a chain of stations on the route to Asia; it became a labour supply for Brazil, the only part of the empire that was making money, and Brazilian prosperity required a constant flow of people across the ocean. No church inside that empire escaped the arrangement. Many clergy owned slaves, some traded in them, and nearly all of them depended financially on the traffic. Even travel ran through it. In 1636 the Jesuit Jeronimo Lobo, coming home from Ethiopia, crossed the Atlantic on a slave ship because it was the quickest way back to Portugal.

Before the trade in Africans reached full volume, the French islands were worked by engages, indentured labourers recruited in Europe among vagabonds, beggars, the idle, former convicts and people who did not fit. Tobacco, cotton, indigo, cacao and cattle needed hands, and colonists and merchants took them wherever they could be found. Shipped to the Antilles, an engage owed thirty six months of service to a planter. His conditions were those of a slave, with the single difference that his servitude ended. A few who survived the term set up afterwards as managers or overseers. Others had come as ruined artisans, coopers, masons, carpenters and blacksmiths hoping for a new start, and most were disappointed. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the arithmetic changed. Large sugar works needed only a thin layer of white supervision plus abundant unskilled labour that was cheap and permanent, and the white emigration was stopped.

Between 1590 and 1634 the workshop of Theodore de Bry issued a long series of illustrated travel volumes that sorted the world into the Indias Occidentales, meaning South America, Mexico and the Caribbean, and the Indias Orientales, meaning the Moluccas and the Philippines. The engravings mapped the new territories in the literal sense and also fixed what readers in Europe expected to find there. Part of the same series covered the stretch of North America the English called Virginia and the Carolinas. The decades on either side brought Jesuits into Asia from 1582 onward, and Europe began assembling a body of knowledge about places whose inhabitants had little corresponding curiosity about Europe. Knowing a region and telling other Europeans what its people were like worked as a second form of possession running alongside the legal claims. The Caribbean islands appear in these books as part of a category invented by treaty and then filled in with pictures.

In the seventeenth century, speakers of Civili and related languages north of the Congo river created an institution called Lemba. It governed the markets and the trade routes running from Malebo Pool to the ports at Loango and Cabinda, and it also healed. Its members were the healers, merchants and chiefs most deeply involved in selling people to Europeans, and what qualified a person for membership was an affliction understood to come from angered ancestors. Initiation meant a public purification and payment to the society in palm wine and manioc root, a plant that had arrived from the Americas and become a staple. The vocabulary came from an inherited verb meaning to calm, to soothe, to turn away the anger of a spirit. Leaders in the region faced a real paradox. The imported cloth they needed in order to hold their followers could be bought only by selling some of those followers. Lemba was the ritual answer to it.