A lagoon let Lagos load captives out of the navy's sight

Lagos became a major slaving port late, in the years between 1815 and 1850, when most of the traffic was already illegal and the British navy was patrolling the coast to suppress it. The town's geography suited the new conditions exactly. It lies behind a long lagoon, so ships could take on captives out of sight of cruisers standing offshore and slip out when the coast was clear. At its peak more than seven thousand people a year left Lagos for the Americas. After 1807 more than three quarters of the vessels working the port were fitted out in the Americas rather than Europe, mostly in Brazil and Cuba, the two markets still buying after the northern powers withdrew. Britain bombarded Lagos in 1851 and occupied it on antislavery grounds, then kept it, which is how the largest city in Nigeria began its formal existence as a British possession.

Arrested in 1758 and sentenced to burn, Makandal was taken to the square in front of the church at Cap-Francais. Accounts agree that he got clear of the flames, in front of a crowd that had come to watch him die. He was retaken and executed shortly afterwards. What the colony remembered was the leap. Haitian painters have returned to the scene since, showing the rebellious slave with magical powers astonishing the spectators, and the episode went on troubling masters and administrators for years after the man himself was ash. For the enslaved population the reading was straightforward: fire did not hold him, so the power he claimed was real, and the authorities that had promised a public death had failed to deliver one in front of witnesses. Executions are performed in order to be seen. This one was seen, and it taught the opposite of what it was staged to teach.

In March and April 1848 Faustin Soulouque, then president of Haiti, broke the political families of the south. The trigger was the killing of Celigny Ardouin, a former deputy accused of conspiring against the government. The fighting reached Port-au-Prince and ended in the massacre of members of several southern households. More than seven hundred surviving relatives took shelter in the British legation. In one incident men hunting refugees came to the consul's steps and found a Union Jack laid across them, and none of them would cross it. Minutes before the killing started, Soulouque had sent a note to the British consul Ussher at the palace promising that all foreigners were under his protection. Ussher saw the events and wrote that the object was to strike terror into the respectable mulattoes whom Soulouque had always taken for his enemies. Afterwards Haitians left for Jamaica in numbers larger than any earlier wave of the decade.

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.