Barbados swaps tobacco for cane and invents the Caribbean plantation

Barbados began as a tobacco colony worked largely by indentured Europeans, and it did badly, undersold by Virginia. In the 1640s the planters changed crop. Sugarcane needs a mill, a boiling house, fuel and a large permanent workforce, so changing the crop changed everything else: land consolidated into estates, smallholders were bought out, and the workforce became African and enslaved. Dutch and Sephardic merchants trading out of Brazil and Amsterdam supplied the technical knowledge, the credit and the shipping. Within a generation Barbados was the most valuable ground in the English empire, and every other island copied it. Saint-Domingue copied it later than most and then outgrew all of them, producing more sugar by the 1780s than Barbados and Jamaica together. What the Barbadian model fixed was a ratio, a small planter class governing a large enslaved majority that it could neither replace nor reproduce. That ratio is the precondition for everything that happens in Saint-Domingue in 1791.

When the Compagnie Francaise des Iles d'Amerique was set up in 1635 to carry on the traffic in enslaved Africans, Louis XIII laid down that everyone the company took had to be baptised and instructed in the Catholic faith. Conversion was the stated purpose of the commerce, and one of the earliest missionaries in the French islands, Father Jean-Baptiste Dutertre, wrote plainly that saving the souls of black people was the reason the business existed. In practice the rule produced an effect nobody in Paris had planned. Enslaved people treated baptism as a source of power rather than a change of allegiance, and presented themselves for it three, four, five and six times over. Planters grew suspicious of the priests, whom they thought capable of preaching that black and white were equal before God, and did what they could to keep religious instruction away from the work gangs.

A Dutch fleet sent from Brazil captured Luanda in August 1641 and held it for seven years. Nzinga, who had gone to Luanda in person in 1623 to offer peace and trade and had been fighting the Portuguese since, suddenly had a powerful and unexpected ally. In Kongo, Garcia II came to the throne the same year, and his reign to 1661 was the last stretch of effective Kongo unity. In 1645, while Portugal was tied up in war with Spain and Angola was under Dutch occupation, the first Capuchin mission slipped into Kongo over Portuguese objections. In 1648 Salvador Correia de Sa was sent from Brazil to drive the Dutch out, and the Portuguese came back to Luanda intent on subduing the kingdom that had backed their enemies. Nzinga did not negotiate again until 1656. By her death in 1663 Matamba had become a major broker in the slave trade.

In February 1644 a group of enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam petitioned the Dutch authorities for their freedom. They had served the Dutch West India Company for eighteen years, they said, and they were burdened with so many children that they could no longer support their families while they stayed in the company's service. The Council of New Netherland granted what historians call half freedom to the named petitioners and their wives. In exchange each man owed the company a yearly payment of wheat and a hog valued at twenty guilders. The council also ruled that their children, those already born and those yet to be born, would serve the company as slaves. The petitioners carried names recording where they had passed through, Paulo Angola, Simon Congo, Anthony Portugis, Jan Fort Orange. They spoke some Dutch and some Portuguese and had stood on two other continents. Their wives appear in the ruling without names.