Sugar exports from the eastern Caribbean start to count

1641 is the year that sugar leaving the eastern Caribbean became a quantity worth recording. Barbados and the Leeward Islands had turned to cane, and these first substantial exports open what historians call the sugar revolution. The phrase covers two things happening at once. Land in the islands was reorganised into large plantations built around a mill and a boiling house, and demand for enslaved African labour climbed in step with the tonnage shipped. Slaving vessels that had worked the Spanish and Portuguese markets now had nearer and richer buyers, and the eastern islands became primary destinations rather than places ships passed. From this point the link holds for two centuries: high volume commodity production in the West Indies is paid for by the systematic importation of people from Africa. Saint-Domingue enters the arrangement decades later and pushes it further than any other colony. The mechanism it inherited had been tested on islands a few days' sail to the east.

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.

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.