Dutch slavers took their final orders in the roads off Texel

Merchants in Amsterdam and the northern Netherlands sent their slaving ships out from the anchorage behind the island of Texel, at the entrance to the Zuiderzee, where deep hulled vessels could lie in shelter. A ship took on its last stores there, and its captain received his sailing instructions there, before standing away for the African coast. Between 1642 and 1794 the Dutch bought most of their captives on the Gold Coast and in the Bight of Benin. In the middle of the seventeenth century they sold across a wide spread of American markets, being at that point the general carriers of the Atlantic. After 1670 the pattern narrowed. Captives went principally to Suriname, where Dutch planters were opening sugar estates, and to Curacao and St Eustatius, the two islands the Dutch ran as re-export markets serving other people's colonies. A Dutch ship of the eighteenth century therefore sailed to a short list of destinations, and every one of them existed to supply somebody's plantations.

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to the whole island for two centuries and had governed the western end of it hardly at all, its own settlers having withdrawn eastward long before.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.

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.