Spain empties its own north coast and hands rivals a foothold

Yingling makes the French presence on Hispaniola a consequence of Spanish policy rather than of French strength. Officials in Santo Domingo feared contraband and, with it, the foreign religious and political ideas that traders carried into a colony already short of food and battered by hurricanes and epidemics. In 1605 Governor Antonio de Osorio therefore evicted the colonists of the western and northern coasts. These devastations gutted the colony's economy: enslaved people fled, crops rotted, livestock scattered and the profitable smuggling links collapsed. The cleared ground did not stay empty. Dutch, English and French settlers moved into it across the seventeenth century, and by the 1670s the French held several small and prosperous ports across western Hispaniola. Yingling's point is that the border which later organised so much of the island's history was opened by an overreaction in Santo Domingo.

Kongo kings had been trying for a century to open a direct line to Rome that Portugal could not cut. In 1604 Alvaro II sent Antonio Nsaku ne Vunda, the Mani Vunda, holder of the oldest religious office in the kingdom and the authority that sanctioned the king's own. He was held up for years in Spain. He landed at Civita Vecchia mortally ill, attended by a few servants and a Spanish Carmelite who had visited the Kongo as a young man, and reached Rome on 5 January 1608, the eve of Epiphany, the feast that celebrates the kings of the world coming to Christ with gifts. Pope Paul V came to his room. The ambassador commended the king and church of the Kongo to him and died. The scene was painted into the frescoes of the Vatican Library and his bust stands in Santa Maria Maggiore.

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.

Before the seventeenth century opened, Europeans controlled few of the islands in the Caribbean. Spain held Trinidad and the large islands, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, where it raised cattle, grew food and a little tobacco and sugar, and above all watched the sea lanes running to the silver of the mainland. Between 1604 and 1640 the English, the French and the Dutch came in and took all the minor islands. The Dutch held part of Brazil from 1625 to 1654. England seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655. Wallerstein sets this rush inside a long slump in the European economy, when appetite for sugar in the wealthy countries was still climbing and each state moved to secure a source before its rivals could. Where taking territory outright was too expensive, as it was against Spain and Portugal, the same states fed off existing colonies through contraband. After the 1650s the division of the Caribbean stayed largely fixed until 1763.