The trade out of West Central Africa multiplied sevenfold

Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the number of captives shipped from West Central Africa rose sevenfold as demand for labour in the Americas intensified. Luanda, the Portuguese base on the Angolan coast, stayed central throughout, and it stopped being the only outlet. From the 1670s Loango and Malembo, north of the Congo River, became major embarkation points. South of Luanda, Benguela grew quickly after 1700. The political detail is the one that matters most. Ports south of the Congo were held and administered by the Portuguese. The trading venues to the north remained under African jurisdiction, governed by African authorities who set the terms and collected the duties, and they were open to merchants of every nationality, so a French, Dutch or English captain could load there on the same footing as a Portuguese one. A large share of the people who ended up in Saint-Domingue came off this coast, which is why Kongo names, Kongo speech and Kongo religious forms sit so deep inside Haitian Vodou.

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 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.

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.