Rhode Island fitted out half the slave ships in North America

Merchants in three small Rhode Island towns, Newport, Bristol and Providence, outfitted roughly half of all slaving voyages sailing from the North American mainland. Their vessels were smaller than European ones and their trade good was rum, distilled in New England out of Caribbean molasses and carried to the Gold Coast forts at Anomabu and Cape Coast Castle. The destinations spread across the Atlantic world. About 11,000 captives went to Saint-Domingue and about 30,000 to Cuba, with the rest distributed through the British Americas. The business ran before the American Revolution and carried on after it. Rhode Island passed a gradual emancipation law in 1784, and its merchants kept sending ships to Africa regardless, because the profit sat in the carrying trade rather than in owning the labour at home. An account that locates American slaving in the plantation South has to explain the ledgers kept at Newport, where a town of a few thousand people organised the deportation of tens of thousands.

In 1757 an enslaved man named Medor went before the court at Cap Francais in Saint Domingue and confessed without being compelled. He said that he and many others used magical powders to persuade owners to grant them their freedom. His statement opened the enormous investigation that became the Makandal affair. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus have since tracked the timing and geography of the deaths blamed on poison that year and argue that mycotoxins in spoiled flour, during a wartime blockade, are the likelier cause. On that reading Medor and the others who confessed to using poison and spells to tame their owners may genuinely have believed their taming had killed by accident. The same pattern turns up far away. In Suriname, Clarinda and Nero insisted that the mixture Nero made from bush herbs was meant to calm Clarinda's mistress, and Clarinda was alarmed when the woman fell ill and died.

In 1640 the Dutch took Angola from Portugal, and Rome used the opening to create an Apostolic Prefecture for the Kongo answering directly to it rather than to Lisbon. The men chosen were Italian Capuchins. Twelve Italian and Spanish friars came ashore at Soyo in May 1645 under their prefect Bonaventura d'Alessano and were welcomed by the count and his people as priests of the great God. Soyo and the Kongo were at war, so the count tried to keep them there; the prefect threatened excommunication and got his porters. King Garcia II received them warmly at Sao Salvador precisely because they were not Portuguese, did not come from Loanda, and represented the direct link to Rome his predecessors had spent fifty years trying to open. Three years later the Portuguese retook Loanda, and a mission with no Portuguese in it became a liability.

When English forces took Jamaica in 1655, observers described the Spanish inhabitants they found there as a debased and degenerate race. The phrase was doing a job. Spaniards born in the Caribbean, several generations away from Europe and mixed with Indigenous and African ancestry, were reclassified as something less than European, and a people who have degenerated can be dispossessed without the awkwardness of taking land from equals. British historians later applied the same description to the Spanish proprietors of Hispaniola, where an argument for expansion needed the same footing under it. The vocabulary outlived its first use. It was aimed at Spaniards in the seventeenth century and at Haitians in the nineteenth and twentieth, and the structure never varied: establish that the present occupants are incapable, and the transfer of their territory reads as a service performed for them. American officers wrote in exactly that register when they landed at Port-au-Prince in 1915.