American ships carried a quarter of all captives in 1806 and 1807

Slaving organised in the mainland North American colonies grew quickly after 1730 and then broke during the American Revolution, as individual states banned the traffic one after another. It recovered. In the closing years of the eighteenth century American merchants found buyers outside the United States, chiefly in Cuba and the Caribbean, and the ships went back to Africa. Between 1804 and 1807 South Carolina lifted its own prohibition on the arrival of new captives, putting a domestic market on top of the foreign one. The effect shows in the figures for 1806 and 1807, when roughly one quarter of all people carried off the African coast travelled under the flag of the United States. Congress then banned the trade from the first day of 1808, the earliest date the Constitution allowed. Those two final years were the busiest the American traffic ever had, and they were worked while the country was already committed in writing to ending it.

At the end of the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue held between 400,000 and 500,000 enslaved people, about 40,000 whites, and some 25,000 free black people and people of mixed descent. In 1789 the colony had 793 sugar plantations. It accounted for more than a third of all French trade outside France, which made it the richest possession the country had, and every year five hundred ships unloaded its sugar, coffee, indigo, copper and timber in French ports. The whites who lived there, whether petty clerks or great planters, were occupied with dinners, balls, taverns and theatres, and with quarrels over the mistresses of estate managers. They resented the rule that colonial produce could be sold only to France and only at prices France set. Visitors were already describing the place as a volcano under the feet of the dancers, and the arithmetic at the head of this entry explains why.

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.

Two women named Leonor sat on the royal council of Garcia II of Kongo. The elder was his aunt, daughter of one king and sister of another, described by the Capuchin Antonio de Teruel as a woman of few words and much judgment whom Garcia and his predecessor venerated and consulted on the outcome of affairs. The younger was the sister of Daniel da Silva, count of Soyo and Garcia's bitter enemy, and also the sister of Garcia's own wife, which made her the living link across that quarrel. In 1652 Garcia had both women arrested for plotting against him and exiled to the countryside with secret orders that they be killed. The minor noble given the task refused, citing their high status and the respect due to them. Garcia brought them back to the capital, killed the younger outright, and treated the elder so harshly that at her age she probably died of it. Capuchins in Sao Salvador reported that the country was horrified.