Friars smash the charms of a village and leave a hole nobody can fill

Capuchin work in the Kongo countryside had two halves. One was baptising and marrying people in places that had gone years or a lifetime without a priest, and the numbers were large; Jerome de Montesarchio once baptised more than a thousand people in a day. The other was war on the local shrines and cults, and it was dangerous. Georges de Geel, a Flemish friar, broke up a cult in a village called Ulolo and threw the objects on a fire, and the villagers beat him so badly that he died ten days later. What the people objected to was subtraction. In 1697 Luca da Caltanisetta recorded men and women in Nsundi telling him he behaved badly in burning their charms, because when a person fell sick they did turn to God first, and when that failed they went to the specialists. Nothing replaced what was burned, so new figures were carved once the friar had moved on.

The Code Noir of 1685 ordered that every enslaved person in the French islands be baptised and instructed in the Catholic religion, and required a planter buying newly arrived Africans to notify the governor within eight days so that instruction and baptism could be arranged. The same text forbade the public exercise of any other religion and directed that offenders be punished as rebels. Marriage of the enslaved was prescribed as well, and the Church pressed it through the following century. The purpose of this apparatus was the quiet reproduction of slavery over a long stretch of time. Masters and administrators watched for anything that might interrupt it: abortion, infanticide, and above all flight from the plantation. Alongside the whip, which had never been sufficient on its own, the colony now had a machine for supervising the few hours of rest a slave was allowed.

The Treaty of Ryswick of 20 September 1697 moved the western third of Hispaniola from Spain to France and created the colony of Saint-Domingue. The figures it eventually produced are worth stating plainly. By the 1780s something near forty percent of the sugar and sixty percent of the coffee consumed in Europe came out of this one territory, an area smaller than Belgium. More than half a million enslaved Africans were living and dying there to produce it, and the mortality was such that the colony needed tens of thousands of fresh arrivals a year simply to hold its workforce level. The elegance of eighteenth century France, including the coffee houses where its philosophers argued about liberty, ran on this. Ryswick also drew a line. The boundary the treaty left vague became, after a century of adjustment and dispute, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A European peace conference created the legal object the revolution would destroy and fixed the shape of the country that replaced it.

On the last day of 1640 a public sale in Dutch Brazil was written up line by line. The captives had arrived on the Wapen van Delf and had been taken at Guinea, at Ardra on the Slave Coast and at Calabar in the Niger delta. The clerk recorded who bought what. Gaspar Dias Ferreira took several lots of ten people, paying between 161 and 205 patacas a head. Moses Netto, Simon van der Neese and Jacob Aboaff appear as purchasers alongside him. Some lots ran past five thousand guilders. The document survives because the Dutch West India Company kept proper accounts, and it is worth more than a hundred pages of description: it names the buyers, fixes the prices, and shows a market in northeastern Brazil where Dutch and Sephardic merchants dealt in human beings by the batch of ten. Not one of the people sold that day is named. The ledger preserves the side of the transaction that somebody expected to need later.