Spain and Portugal separate and the Spanish colonies lose their supplier

For sixty years a single king ruled both Spain and Portugal, and the arrangement solved a practical problem. Portugal held the trading posts on the African coast, Spain held the American colonies that wanted labour, and Portuguese ships could deliver captives into Spanish ports without breaking any law. In 1640 the union ended. Portugal recovered its own crown and its vessels lost the legal right to sell in Spanish territory. Madrid then had to license foreigners, which it did through the asiento, a contract granting one company the exclusive right to supply the Spanish colonies with enslaved Africans for a term of years. The asiento passed in turn to Dutch, French and British holders and became one of the most fought over prizes in European diplomacy. Santo Domingo, the Spanish half of Hispaniola, sat inside that system and was starved by it, receiving few captives and little investment while the French west filled up. The line that eventually split the island into two countries was drawn partly by who was licensed to sell people where.

For most of the sixteenth century the Atlantic slave trade was organised from Seville, Lisbon and the Portuguese islands off Africa. From 1640 its centre of gravity moved sharply north and stayed there. Liverpool, London, Bristol and Nantes took over the outfitting, the credit and the insurance, and merchants in nearly every northern European port with a serious Atlantic commerce began sending out slaving expeditions of their own. Within a few decades those cities held the place the Spanish and Portuguese centres had held in the century before. This matters for Haiti because Nantes is where Saint-Domingue's labour supply was arranged. A merchant house on the Loire fitted out a vessel, sent it to the African coast for captives and on to Cap Francais for sugar and coffee, and settled the accounts back in France. The colony that became the richest in the world was fed by a machine assembled in northern Europe after 1640, and the men who ran it never had to look at what it did.

Dorothe Angola took in an orphaned boy called Anthony, the child of half free parents in New Netherland, and became his adoptive parent. Maria Portogys apprenticed her daughter as a household servant to a Dutch family. Both arrangements went through the colonial authorities, which is the only reason the two women have names that survive. Almost everything else about them is missing, including their presence in the freedom petition their husbands signed, where the wives are referred to and never listed. Placing a child in a Dutch household tied the adult to the colony and kept the family within the colony's reach, which suited the Dutch. In the paperwork the children exist as use value. What the two women were doing was working the only instrument within reach, the colony's own record keeping, to hold on to children whom the law had already assigned to somebody else.

In 1641 French buccaneers based on Tortuga, the small island off the north coast of Hispaniola, began settling on the mainland opposite. Nothing about it was official. They were men who hunted the wild cattle and pigs that had bred out of control since the Spanish herds were abandoned, cured the meat, sold hides, and took ships when the chance came. Spain had drawn its population into the east of the island decades earlier and left the west empty, and an empty coast attracts exactly this kind of settlement. What the buccaneers created was a fact on the ground. France had claimed nothing and administered nothing, yet Frenchmen were living, working and defending themselves on Hispaniola, and by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 Spain conceded the western third to France. Saint-Domingue begins here, and Haiti after it. The richest colony in the Atlantic world grew out of a camp of armed squatters that no government had sent.