Amsterdam closes its community to its own black members

Young men of mixed race had been able to study in the yeshiva of the Sephardic community of Amsterdam. Circumcised black Jews could be called up to the Torah, and burials were carried out without regard to colour. All of that ended after the middle of the seventeenth century. Schorsch traces the change to a growing anxiety about whiteness among Jews of the Atlantic world, who found that the category of white admitted them to the dominant culture in a way that being non Christian never could. Early modern codes of racial exclusion were unstable, and Jews themselves were sometimes described as black and ugly, which is part of why some of them argued for their own whiteness. As the anxiety grew, so did distance from non white servants and slaves, particularly in Amsterdam. Christian neighbours were practising the same exclusions, and these communities followed them.

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.

Barbados sits on its own, east of the arc of the Lesser Antilles and about a hundred miles to windward of them. In the 1640s sugarcane was planted there. The island that took the crop first was also the first piece of land a vessel running before the trade winds out of Africa would meet, which made it the natural point of arrival and the natural distribution point for the eastern Caribbean. What followed was a transfer of labour and capital on a scale the region had never seen. Money came from Amsterdam and London, milling and boiling technique came from Brazil, and people came in irons from the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. Every later sugar colony in the Caribbean, Saint-Domingue included, is a variation on a system worked out on four hundred square kilometres of ground. The crop itself had reached the Atlantic from New Guinea by way of India, Persia, the Mediterranean and the Portuguese islands, and it arrived in the Americas already attached to a labour regime.

In the middle of the seventeenth century England set out to break Spanish control of the Caribbean by force, and Hispaniola was the target. The expedition of 1655 failed to take the island. It belonged to a wider policy of acquiring a Caribbean foothold by conquest, and the fleet went on to seize Jamaica, which England kept. Logan treats the failed attempt as the start of something that lasted. For the next century and a half British diplomacy and British war planning returned again and again to the value of the island, and particularly to its western harbours, the deep water that would later serve Saint-Domingue. That interest was acted on in 1793, when a British army landed in the middle of the Haitian Revolution and spent five years and tens of thousands of lives failing to hold the colony. The ambition declared in 1655 was still being pursued when Toussaint Louverture negotiated the British off the island in 1798.