Elizabeth I licenses a merchant to carry black residents out of England

In the last decade of the sixteenth century England had a rising population and a shortage of food, and the government treated the shortage as a crisis that stretched it to the limit. Elizabeth I wrote to the mayors of the principal cities to say that too many blackamores had lately been brought into the realm, that there were already far too many of them given how God had increased the people of the land, and that they ought to be sent out of it. In January 1601 she restated the instruction as a royal proclamation, licensing a merchant of Lubeck to carry away Africans who had been brought into the country, described as an annoyance to her own subjects. Those Africans were present in English cities in their thousands because England had entered the slave trade. A domestic problem of harvests and prices was restated as a problem of black people, and the proposed remedy was removal.

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.