A colonial census counts 9,696 enslaved people and a collapsed sugar trade

A colonial census taken in Santo Domingo in 1606 listed 9,696 enslaved people in a total population of perhaps sixteen thousand. Of those, only 800 were employed in sugar. Forty years earlier the same colony had held about twenty thousand captives and had shipped sugar in quantity. Three things ended that. Spain restricted where and with whom its colonists could trade. The empire turned its attention and its best administrators toward New Spain and Peru, which had silver and large settled indigenous populations. Brazilian sugar undercut the Dominican product in Europe. What replaced the mills was cattle ranching, tobacco and small plots farmed by peasants, many of them freed people or their children, often far from any official who might interfere. Church and state in Santo Domingo became among the weakest in Spanish America. That weakness frustrated the local elite and left room for everyone the sugar regime had ground down.

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.

In 1605 the Spanish authorities on Hispaniola ordered the settlers of the western part of the island to abandon their towns and move east, and burned what they left behind. The reason was contraband. The western settlements had been trading with French and English smugglers for a generation, and Madrid concluded that the cure was to remove the population doing it. The order worked as policy and failed as strategy. Trade with foreigners stopped in those places because the places had ceased to exist. What remained was several hundred kilometres of empty coastline, with harbours, fresh water, and cattle running wild across the abandoned country. French and English crews who had been raiding Spanish shipping now had a shore they could use without opposition, and within twenty years they were living on it. The line Spain drew in 1605 by pulling its own people eastward runs close to the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic today. It began as an anti smuggling measure.

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.