The minor slave traders of the Baltic still carried a hundred thousand

Set beside Portugal, Britain and France, the merchants of Scandinavia and the Hanse towns of northern Germany were minor participants in the Atlantic slave trade. They still carried more than one hundred thousand people off the coast of Africa. Their share mattered most in the late seventeenth century, and it grew again in the 1790s when Spain opened free ports where enslaved people could be landed without paying duty, creating a market that any flag could serve. More than half the voyages organised in the Baltic sailed from Copenhagen, and most of the captives were bought at the Danish forts on the Gold Coast. The great majority of them spent the rest of their lives on plantations in the Danish West Indies, on St Croix and St Thomas. The word minor is doing real work in that sentence. It ranks a country in a table, and the quantity being ranked is a hundred thousand people who never went home.

The Treaty of Ryswick, concluded in 1697, obliged Spain to cede a third of Hispaniola to France. The ceded territory took the name Saint-Domingue. Sugar was already being made there, and the arrival of enslaved labour in quantity was about to change how it was produced. Through the eighteenth century the traffic in captives climbed to its peak before falling away, in the language of the day, for want of supply. Ships were built larger to carry more people. Captives lay chained in pairs in holds that the trade itself called floating tombs, and the crossing to Saint-Domingue took between forty and ninety days on short rations. Most African regions were represented in the colony, and among the three largest groupings the Fon of Dahomey, combined with the Yoruba of what is now Nigeria, supplied the framework on which the transplanted religious practice of the island was built.

Barbados began as a tobacco colony worked largely by indentured Europeans, and it did badly, undersold by Virginia. In the 1640s the planters changed crop. Sugarcane needs a mill, a boiling house, fuel and a large permanent workforce, so changing the crop changed everything else: land consolidated into estates, smallholders were bought out, and the workforce became African and enslaved. Dutch and Sephardic merchants trading out of Brazil and Amsterdam supplied the technical knowledge, the credit and the shipping. Within a generation Barbados was the most valuable ground in the English empire, and every other island copied it. Saint-Domingue copied it later than most and then outgrew all of them, producing more sugar by the 1780s than Barbados and Jamaica together. What the Barbadian model fixed was a ratio, a small planter class governing a large enslaved majority that it could neither replace nor reproduce. That ratio is the precondition for everything that happens in Saint-Domingue in 1791.

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.