The Gold Coast stops selling gold and starts selling people

The Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, roughly the coasts of modern Ghana, Togo, Benin and western Nigeria, together supplied about a quarter of all the people carried across the Atlantic in the slave trade. The Gold Coast earned its European name from what it sold first. Gold brought the Portuguese there in the fifteenth century and paid for the castles built along that shore. After 1700 the balance turned, and ports such as Anomabu and Cape Coast Castle became among the busiest embarkation points on the continent. The Bight of Benin, working through Ouidah and later Lagos, remained one of the largest suppliers to the Americas through the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. The two coasts ended differently. Gold Coast shipments were largely shut down by the early 1820s, once British cruisers were enforcing abolition from forts the British already held there, while Ouidah and Lagos went on selling for another forty years.

France established a colony on Tortuga, the island off the northwestern coast of Hispaniola, in 1625. It was a modest thing. A rocky island a few kilometres offshore, occupied by buccaneers, adventurers and men with reasons to be a long way from Europe. What made it consequential is that the French crown claimed it. A crew of raiders becomes a settlement, a settlement becomes a possession, a possession acquires a governor, and the governor's remit reaches across the channel to the mainland coast Spain had abandoned twenty years earlier. From that beachhead France worked its way into the western third of Hispaniola, which Spain conceded formally in 1697 and which became the colony of Saint-Domingue. Within a century Saint-Domingue was producing more sugar and coffee than any other territory on earth and returning more profit than any colony in the history of European empire. All of it traces to a claim staked on an island most maps do not bother to name.

France declared sovereignty over western Hispaniola in 1664. The declaration covered a place French settlers and buccaneers had already been living in for decades, so the novelty lay in the claim rather than in the occupation. Spain rejected it. Madrid had held the island since Columbus and regarded every French farm on it as a trespass, and thirty three years passed before Spanish recognition came in a European peace treaty. Through those years the French planted, imported captives, and fought. The ground in question is the western third of the island, and it became Saint-Domingue. By the 1780s that strip of land was producing more wealth than any comparable territory on earth, more sugar and coffee than all the British West Indies together, and every unit of it was produced by people carried across the Atlantic in chains. A claim made on paper in 1664 is the legal ancestor of that arrangement.

Faustin Soulouque, head of the Haitian state and a committed servant of the spirits, made himself emperor in 1850 and ruled without mercy. The European newspapers had been waiting for a figure like him. They called him the sum of every recollection of aboriginal savagery and announced that he had set Haiti on a course of complete regression to African barbarism. Honore Daumier produced a caricature the same year showing the emperor in his regalia about to drop a journalist who had criticised Haitian politics into a pot of boiling water. Racist theory was gaining ground across Europe in these decades and it found in Haitian religion an inexhaustible supply of material. Soulouque fell in 1860. What is worth noticing is how little the coverage had to do with him. The caricature was about the existence of a black state, and the emperor merely gave it a face.