Louis XIII permits slavery on condition that it saves souls

Louis XIII approved an edict permitting the enslavement of Africans in the French colonies, with a condition attached. The purpose of the traffic was to be the conversion of the captives to Christianity. Whatever the king privately thought, the legal form is what matters, because it is the form French slavery kept. Enslaving a person was licensed as an act of salvation performed upon that person, which turned a commercial arrangement into a spiritual duty and gave the crown an answer to anyone citing the older maxim that France holds no slaves. A French court had said exactly that forty four years earlier. The Code Noir of 1685 carried the same logic forward, opening with articles on religion, baptism and instruction before it turned to the treatment of the enslaved. The obligation to convert was also the only limit the law placed on an owner that the owner had not chosen for himself. It bought the church's consent, and it bought it cheaply.

Francis Drake sacked Santo Domingo in 1586, and the ease of it announced that Spain could no longer hold what it claimed. The deeper trouble was commercial. Spain required its colonists to buy and sell only through Spanish channels at Spanish prices, and the settlers of Hispaniola were poor, remote and badly served. English and French ships began arriving to trade with them directly, undercutting the licensed merchants, and the colonists dealt with them gladly. In 1599 Samuel de Champlain saw thirteen foreign merchantmen working at Mole Saint Nicolas on the northwest coast, in open defiance of an embargo whose penalty was execution or the galleys. The island had become a cost to the Spanish crown instead of a source of revenue. Then in September 1629 the Spanish admiral Federico Toledo Osorio cleared the French and English out of Saint Kitts. The men he expelled had to land somewhere. They went to the north coast of Hispaniola and the small island lying off it.

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.

Two Portuguese documents survive that describe how much business the island of Sao Tome did with the mainland ports of the Bights of Benin and Biafra. The first, from 1607, gives values in milreis. Allada is entered at 800, Whydah at 200 and Popo at 400, so the whole Slave Coast comes to 1,400 out of a regional total of 2,500. Earlier readers took those numbers as the value of goods the ports could absorb, which made the trade look tiny. A closer look at the wording suggests the figures were estimates of a ten per cent tax, so the real trade was ten times larger. On that reading Allada was selling the equivalent of up to 667 people a year and the coast as a whole up to 1,167. The second paper, from 1620, counts ships rather than value, and gives Allada one or two a year, which points to a fall.