Suriname absorbed three hundred thousand people into its sugar estates

Suriname was the principal settlement in the Dutch Guianas and the centre of a rapid expansion of sugar cultivation, which meant a rapid expansion in the demand for enslaved labour. Until the 1780s Dutch vessels held something close to a monopoly on landing captives there, so the colony's supply was controlled from Amsterdam and Middelburg rather than bid for on an open market. West Central Africa and the Gold Coast were the leading sources, although some of the people recorded as leaving the Gold Coast had probably been embarked further west along the Windward Coast, which is a useful caution about how precisely these origins can be read. Close to three hundred thousand people arrived in the Dutch Guianas across the period. Mortality on the Suriname estates was high enough that the labour force had to be replaced continuously, and that is the same arithmetic that governed Saint-Domingue. A colony which works people to death has to keep buying.

The most famous poison case in the French Caribbean ended in 1758 with the execution of Makandal in Saint Domingue. The charge that carried it was sacrilege, and the object at its centre was a tied up bundle of power containing a crucifix. Bundles like it were made across the Atlantic world and their contents can be listed from trial records: grave dirt, animal horns used both for cupping and for binding other objects together, feathers, herbs, and in the Portuguese colonies pieces of consecrated host, papers bearing the names of saints, and small crosses. Christian material inside such a bundle was what colonial courts found intolerable, and cases described as sacrilegious were the ones the Lisbon Inquisition proved most willing to bring to trial. The papers on Makandal, letters and interrogations running from 1757 to 1759, were gathered together by Moreau de Saint-Mery and sit in a single box in the French colonial archive.

The catechism prepared for the Allada mission had to find local words for Christian ideas. For God it used vodun, the general term for the deities of the region, in place of Mawu, the name recorded there later for a single creator who lives in the sky. For Jesus it used Lisa, a deity who in accounts collected in Dahomey comes down from heaven after the first creation to give human beings order and skill. Robin Law reads the choice of the general term as a sign that in Allada in the 1650s a supreme god had not yet been sharply separated from the rest. The detail matters a long way from Africa. Vodun is the ancestor of the Haitian word Vodou, and people from Allada and Whydah were shipped in large numbers to Saint-Domingue. Here the word is being written down in Madrid in 1658, inside a book meant to convert them, with a sense wide enough to hold the Christian God.

The most violent of the rural codes written by the Haitian state was the one promulgated by President Jean Pierre Boyer in 1826. It bound peasants who owned nothing, or owned a fragment of land, to three years of compulsory labour on a large estate. It forbade them to move freely outside their rural section. It placed their work under the supervision of the army. The estates in question had belonged to French colonists who were killed or fled, and after independence they were divided among the black and mulatto generals and the senior officials of the new state. A succession of Haitian governments issued codes of this kind and they resembled one another closely, because they all answered the same problem: how to make people who had just stopped being slaves produce export crops on somebody else's land.