In Kongo, dancing a war dance was the phrase used for declaring war

A Jesuit report of January 1622 on a Kongo rebellion uses the word sangamento, dancing a war dance, as the ordinary expression for going to war. Seventeenth century writers in the kingdom, Africans and Europeans alike, treated the phrase as a synonym for the decision itself. The dancing was training. Where battles were settled by swords and axes at close quarters, dancing quickened reflexes and taught men to parry, doing the work that drill did in European armies. After 1680, when muskets took over and fighting was done at a distance, the practice survived. Luca da Caltanisetta watched the musketeer army of the prince of Nsoyo dance before war in 1691, and Rafael de Castello de Vide saw the same thing ninety years later, in 1781. European and colonial forces of the period marched, drummed and carried flags. They did not dance. When the rebels at Stono in South Carolina stopped in a field in 1739 to dance and beat drums, they were doing something an English colonist had no framework for reading.

In March 1685 the French crown issued the edict known as the Code Noir. Its sixty articles set out how enslaved people in the French colonies were to be held, fed, clothed, punished, married, baptised and buried. It required conversion to Catholicism and expelled Jews from the colonies. It defined the enslaved as movable property while also treating them as persons capable of crime and of religious duty, a contradiction the colonial courts spent a century managing. It fixed that a child followed the condition of its mother, which made every child born to an enslaved woman the property of her owner and made rape profitable. It placed some limits on masters, requiring rations and clothing and forbidding certain killings, and enforcement of those limits was rare. The edict framed French colonial slavery until 1848. Saint-Domingue was the colony where it governed the most people, and the people it governed there ended it themselves in 1793.

Louis XIV of France and William III of England closed their war in 1697 by exchanging territory neither of them had ever seen. The Treaty of Ryswick was a general settlement covering Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and among its terms Spain gave up the western third of Hispaniola to France. Spain had held nominal title to the whole island for two centuries and had governed the western end of it hardly at all, its own settlers having withdrawn eastward long before. France received the piece that turned out to matter. Over the following century Saint-Domingue produced revenue on a scale that is hard to state without sounding careless. By the 1780s the colony was worth more to France, in trade and customs receipts, than the thirteen British colonies of North America were worth to Britain. One third of one Caribbean island out-earned the eastern seaboard of a continent. That is the wealth the enslaved population created, and it is the wealth they carried out of the empire with them.

On the last day of 1640 a public sale in Dutch Brazil was written up line by line. The captives had arrived on the Wapen van Delf and had been taken at Guinea, at Ardra on the Slave Coast and at Calabar in the Niger delta. The clerk recorded who bought what. Gaspar Dias Ferreira took several lots of ten people, paying between 161 and 205 patacas a head. Moses Netto, Simon van der Neese and Jacob Aboaff appear as purchasers alongside him. Some lots ran past five thousand guilders. The document survives because the Dutch West India Company kept proper accounts, and it is worth more than a hundred pages of description: it names the buyers, fixes the prices, and shows a market in northeastern Brazil where Dutch and Sephardic merchants dealt in human beings by the batch of ten. Not one of the people sold that day is named. The ledger preserves the side of the transaction that somebody expected to need later.