Copenhagen ran the Baltic's share of the slave trade

Copenhagen was the organising centre for slave trafficking among the countries around the Baltic and the home port of the Danish West Indies Company. The Danish operation was unusually tidy. Its ships traded almost entirely at one point on the African coast, the fort of Christiansborg on the Gold Coast, and delivered almost entirely to two places in the Caribbean, St Thomas and St Croix. Those islands were small and their own estates could not absorb everyone landed, so they became re-export centres, selling captives onward into the colonies of larger empires. Measured against the British or French traffic the Danish share was slight. Measured against what it sustained it was not, because without it the Danish West Indies had no plantation economy at all. Denmark legislated an end to its slave trade in 1803, ahead of Britain and well ahead of France. Slavery in the islands themselves continued until 1848, which is what the ban was written to permit.

The Code Noir settled the legal question of what an enslaved person was. The answer was movable property, meuble in French law, which placed a human being in the same column as furniture and cattle: bought, sold, mortgaged, seized for debt, divided among heirs. Baptism was compulsory and certain punishments were formally prohibited, and in Saint-Domingue neither provision was enforced. What the colony did enforce was output. Someone landed there from a slave ship could expect roughly seven years of life, and the whip, the branding iron and the mutilation of runaways were ordinary instruments of labour discipline. This is the law the rising of 1791 set out to destroy, and it explains why the destruction went further than a change of government. A people defined in statute as property does not finish the job by capturing a treasury. The Haitian declaration of independence answers a legal claim about what human beings are, which is why the document still reads as philosophy.

On 20 September 1697, in the treaty signed at Ryswick, Spain recognised French sovereignty over the western third of Hispaniola. Spain had claimed the whole island since 1492 and had lost working control of its western end decades before, as French buccaneers occupied the coast and the offshore island of Tortuga and proved impossible to dislodge. The treaty confirmed the fact on the ground and drew no precise line, leaving a question open for two hundred years. From this point the two halves carry separate names in the record. The French portion is Saint-Domingue and the Spanish portion is Santo Domingo, and Rayford Logan is careful with the distinction because his sources often are not. The frontier between them was disputed, redrawn, invaded across, and fixed by treaty only in 1929. France meanwhile developed its share into the most profitable overseas territory any European state possessed. Two countries share the island today, and the line between them was first sketched by diplomats settling a European war.

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.