Bonny rose with Liverpool and with the Aro trading network

Bonny and New Calabar lie close together in the eastern Niger delta and were politically separate, each governed by its own trading houses and answerable to nobody in the other. Both were central to the British slave trade. Bonny grew the faster of the two, and the reason was its connection to the Aro, an Igbo network of traders and warriors whose oracle and reputation gave them standing across a wide territory inland and let them move captives to the coast in numbers no European could have organised. Between 1760 and 1810 that supply made the Bight of Biafra the second largest source region for people shipped to the Americas. The rise of Bonny ran in parallel with the rise of Liverpool, and the pairing let Liverpool ships take command of the market in the British Caribbean. Two ports on opposite sides of an ocean grew on each other, and neither of them was the capital of anything.

The Code Noir settled the legal question of what an enslaved person was. The answer was movable property, meuble in French law, which placed a human being in the same column as furniture and cattle: bought, sold, mortgaged, seized for debt, divided among heirs. Baptism was compulsory and certain punishments were formally prohibited, and in Saint-Domingue neither provision was enforced. What the colony did enforce was output. Someone landed there from a slave ship could expect roughly seven years of life, and the whip, the branding iron and the mutilation of runaways were ordinary instruments of labour discipline. This is the law the rising of 1791 set out to destroy, and it explains why the destruction went further than a change of government. A people defined in statute as property does not finish the job by capturing a treasury. The Haitian declaration of independence answers a legal claim about what human beings are, which is why the document still reads as philosophy.

On 20 September 1697, in the treaty signed at Ryswick, Spain recognised French sovereignty over the western third of Hispaniola. Spain had claimed the whole island since 1492 and had lost working control of its western end decades before, as French buccaneers occupied the coast and the offshore island of Tortuga and proved impossible to dislodge. The treaty confirmed the fact on the ground and drew no precise line, leaving a question open for two hundred years. From this point the two halves carry separate names in the record. The French portion is Saint-Domingue and the Spanish portion is Santo Domingo, and Rayford Logan is careful with the distinction because his sources often are not. The frontier between them was disputed, redrawn, invaded across, and fixed by treaty only in 1929. France meanwhile developed its share into the most profitable overseas territory any European state possessed. Two countries share the island today, and the line between them was first sketched by diplomats settling a European war.

In 1741 the Conde das Galveas, viceroy of Brazil, sent the king a broadly positive report that ended with a warning about great illnesses sweeping Salvador, fluxes and people bleeding from the mouth. By the autumn of 1743 his tone had changed completely. More than five thousand people had sickened and died in recent years and the colony was in a terrible state. Jesuits at the Engenho de Santa Anna had already reported in the early 1730s that they could not cope with the number of sick around them. Galveas never wrote that these deaths were poisonings. In the same year as the alarming report he set in motion an ordinance on poison, which made administering it worth investigating even where nobody died, and required anyone selling poison to register with the state. Over the following decades denunciations to the Inquisition of causing or of treating such illnesses climbed rapidly.